It could be argued that the current adult education paradigm aligns with a liberal knowledge economy. A more critical perspective is Paulo Freire's banking education concept that removes criticality from a learner's repertoire and facilitates alignment with the prevalent liberal education and its hegemonic objectives. Drawing from Paulo Freire's (1990) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Flores (2017) suggested that banking education teaches the oppressed to accept the oppressor's social framework. In this paper, and through the analysis of news media articles and policy documents, the author examines the phenomenon of terrorism and how a Western worldview constructs and engages in meaning-making for the reader. As a result, the author proposes a more critical cognizant adult learning model. Drawing from Habermasian theory, the need to cultivate humanity, and criticality as practiced by Critical Discourse Analysis, the author proposes a learning model construct of evolving criticality, emancipatory in intent, complex in its components and their relationships, with the intent of giving back agency to citizens.