The first two Slovene books on the theory of adult education appeared in the 1920s, when pedagogy was becoming more and more focused on school pedagogy. Both the book by Karel Oswald (1927) and by Franjo Žgeč (1923) put forward the question of who will educate the masses of adults. Half a century later, adult education finally established its basic paradigms and foundations as a science within the University of Ljubljana. The first lectures in andragogy took place at the Department of Pedagogy, Faculty of Arts in 1973. Under the auspices of the Head of Department, Vlado Schmidt, three streams of pedagogy studies where created in 1976: school pedagogy, pedagogy of educators in residential institutions, and andragogy. The final stage in the development of andragogy studies occurred in the framework of the European project PHARE, when the independent study programme of andragogy was launched in the 1993/94 academic year with the support of several professors of andragogy from various European universities. In this paper I show where my interest in the development of andragogy originated – it grew out of concrete situations, from the people and for the people upwards – and I justify the need for a humanistically based andragogy. Prvi slovenski strokovni knjigi o teoriji izobraževanja odraslih sta iz dvajsetih let prejšnjega stoletja, ko se je pedagogika vedno bolj osredotočala na šolsko pedagogiko. Takrat sta Karel Ozvald (1927) in Franjo Žgeč (1923) v svojih knjigah utemeljila potrebo po izobraževanju »širokih ljudskih mas«. Minilo je skoraj pol stolet­ja, ko je izobraževanje odraslih dobilo znanstveno osnovo, svojo vedo. Razvoj študija andragogike je potekal v treh fazah. Na Oddelku za pedagogiko Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani smo predavanja andragogike uvedli pred 50 leti, leta 1973. Leta 1976 so pod vodstvom predstojnika Vlada Schmidta na Oddelku za pedagogiko nastale tri študijske usmeritve: šolska pedagogika, domska pedagogika in andragogika. Končna faza razvoja študija andragogike se je oblikovala v okviru evropskega programa PHARE, ko se je v študijskem letu 1993/94 ob podpori več profesorjev andragogike z različnih evropskih univerz začel izvajati enopredmetni študij andragogike z nazivom diplomirani andragog. V prispevku prikazujem, od kod je izhajal moj interes za razvoj andragogike – rastel je iz konkretnih razmer, od ljudi in za ljudi navzgor –, ter utemeljujem potrebo po humanistično zasnovani andragogiki.