of tasks for its citizens to perform – might notrequire the sort of ‘re-skilling’ adult educationoften performs. Similarly, a society that held fastto a particular set of truths (religious, scientific,political or other) might see little need for itscitizens to pursue other lines of enquiry or mightactively seek to suppress them.These examples suggest that the sort of societythat does value adult education is likely to be animperfect one – and one that acknowledges itsimperfections; a society that acknowledges thattotal equality in childhood is impossible, as muchthrough accidents of circumstance as materialdifferences; a society that realises the possibilitiesand threats posed by change; a society thatis not static but is changed and challenged bynewcomers and new developments; and one witha relatively high life expectancy. This remindsus that a ‘good’ society is one that is constantlyin a dialectic relationship to ‘less good’ aspectsof itself and to the necessity of change. It mighteven follow from this that adult education ismore likely to be valued within a society thathas experienced profound change – such as awar or other devastation, or the collapse of thedominant economic model, with consequencesfor the worldview, quality of life and futureprospects of its inhabitants (and for the hierarchiesbetween different people, which adulteducation itself can do so much to disrupt). 7 Sucha society might need adult education to equip itscitizens to survive, existentially and practically,in new circumstances and so that they could helpthe younger population to adapt as well.Where are we now?Our society places some value on adulteducation, but we value it (at best) in an ambivalentway. New Labour’s record was contradictory,with notable investment in adult andfurther education after 1997 but patchy results.Further education faced devastating cuts beforethe change of government in 2010 and adulteducation as a coherent entity within universitieshas all but disappeared. The creation of theCampaigning Alliance for Lifelong Learning(CALL), in the last years of New Labour, was justone symptom of the unease felt by professionalsand students in both sectors. 8Nor is the situation improving under theCoalition. For example, the new funding arrangementsfor universities post-2012 are designedfor a model in which the vast majority of undergraduateentrants are school leavers. This hasprofound implications for the scope and range ofany efforts to widen participation, as opposed tosimply increasing it, since it excludes those wholeave school at an earlier stage.Even when the New Labour governmentsmade some attempt to support adult learning,they seemed rather vague about what they weretrying to do. For example, in 2009 the LabourGovernment launched a £20 million ‘transformation’fund for ‘informal adult learning’. SionSimon, the further education minister, explainedhow it was designed to work in a BBC interview:Sion Simon: [It’s] kind of an innovation fund, toback people who’ve got new ideas about innovativeways of doing informal adult learning, i.e. thekind of learning that people do for pleasure, forfun, rather than for qualifications or for work.Interviewer: We’re talking about perhaps learninga foreign language [because] you want to have asecond home, in the days when people still boughtsuch things… rather than doing learning that isfor skills?Sion Simon: Yeah the focus of governmentpolicy over the last few years and indeed nowin these straitened times has been very muchon skills, on qualifications, on giving people –particularly the lower skilled – the skills andqualifications they need to get back into work. Butwe also have a commitment, and that’s what thiswhite paper is about, to the kind of learning thatpeople do for pleasure… and what we’re trying todo is find new and exciting ways of helping peopleto do that more.Interviewer: When you say ‘new and exciting’,you immediately think this all has to be done onthe cheap somehow. And you’ve got to get peoplein there to staff it as well. It sounds a rathercuriously unfocused plan…Sion Simon: I’m not talking about theGovernment setting up courses for people. Whatthis is really about is, er, helping people to domore of things that they already do. So, forinstance, there’s a huge amount of learning thatgoes on that is self-organised and with the adventof the world wide web, which itself is fundamen-7 This is not to ignore the factthat, within such a society, theremight still be particular andacute constraints on how sucheducation could be organised orfunded.8 See www.callcampaign.org.uk/.Education for the good society | 41
9 See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7958945.stm.10 Quoted from personal correspondence.tally self-organised and individual, but peoplefind they want to put a group on, but they’ve gotnowhere to do it; or they’ve got a reading groupthat doesn’t cost any money but it just needssomewhere to meet and there are 20 people thatwant to come and they don’t quite fit in anybody’sfront room. 9It was admirable that the Government (in ‘straitenedtimes’) found a sum of money like this forinformal learning and that a minister was willingto defend a vision of education broader than‘qualifications for work’ (while acknowledgingthat such qualifications are important). Yet thisdefence of the policy is unsatisfactory, especiallyas Simon is probed by the interviewer. It is astrikingly attenuated vision of education in whichit is either for pleasure/fun or for qualifications.Within this context it is no surprise if anythingnon-utilitarian is relegated to marginal categoriessuch as ‘informal’ or ‘leisure’ learning. It alsobecomes apparent that there is a hierarchicaldistinction at work. The ‘lower skilled’ need qualificationsto get ‘back into work’, while informallearning is resolutely middle class. It operatesas a consolation for those who can no longerafford their second home or whose front room isnot large enough for their aspirations. Informallearning is ‘fundamentally self-organised andindividual’ and ‘self-directed’, designed to help‘people to do more of things that they already do’and it is definitely not ‘about the Governmentsetting up courses for people’. Indeed, what ismost striking about this description of the fund ishow much it resembles the aims of, and tensionswithin, the Big Society.How else might we talk about adulteducation?What is missing here? How else might we talkabout adult education? Jon Cruddas has written:What interests me is why we have lost that senseof education and a broader sense of fulfilment,self-realisation, human flourishing – which wasalso central to the democratic socialist tradition.Knowledge was everything and was [a] rich partof the working class socialist experience. Nowwhere did all that go? 10The language and tradition highlighted byCruddas are absent in Simon’s account of adultlearning. Simon gives no sense of educationfor the public good or for a social purpose;of its benefits to families and communities, aswell as to the individual; of the transformativepower of education’s implicit benefits for theindividual, such as in renewed confidence ora changed worldview; or of skills that are notjust for work. Nor is there a sense of how adulteducation can be transformative when it bringstogether students from wildly different social andeducational backgrounds. There is also, as ever, aconfusion of ends and means. We seem to haveforgotten that qualifications (sometimes) help usto measure what is valuable in education but arenot the value in themselves.How can we understand the value of adulteducation? We talk too easily sometimes of‘education for its own sake’, which risks makingit sounds as though it exists apart from humanconcerns. Similarly, we may forget that the kindof economic transformation that education canfacilitate should be utilised to create better humanlives, not as an end to which such lives might besacrificed. I have come across many students, oncourses for a qualification and those for ‘leisure’,who were seeking to re-make their lives throughadult education: as they recovered from mentalor physical ill health, or a period of caring fora loved one; to make up for an unhappy schoolexperience or a turbulent young life; to changecareer or after a period of unemployment; inorder to have a place to think in, outside work,or to gain a new skill that was not for their job;to adjust to life as a single parent; to re-makethemselves after a period in prison; to understandtheir own racial, religious or cultural heritage; orwith a sense of urgent need that they could notimmediately articulate.Education is the process by which we makeand re-make a sense of our lives, of the world andour part in it. It should be part of how we make aGood Society. Only if a wide range of opportunitiesfor adults exists, in all sectors, can educationfulfil its radical and transformative potential, tochange individual lives and also to challenge thehierarchies and assumptions within which we allexist.There is enormous scope for debate about whatforms of adult education provision are needed or42 | www.compassonline.org.uk
- Page 1 and 2: Educationfor theGoodSocietyThe valu
- Page 3 and 4: Acknowledgements:Compass would like
- Page 5 and 6: ContributorsLisa Nandy is Labour MP
- Page 7 and 8: IntroductionEducation for the Good
- Page 9 and 10: 1 This article has been developedou
- Page 11 and 12: 8 See Ann Hodgson, Ken Spoursand Ma
- Page 13 and 14: 13 The most comprehensiverecent res
- Page 15 and 16: 1 See for example B. Simon, ‘Cane
- Page 17 and 18: 10 J. Martin, Making Socialists: Ma
- Page 19 and 20: the poorest homes (as measured by e
- Page 21 and 22: 1 In 2008, 15 per cent ofacademies
- Page 23 and 24: 1 Angela McRobbie, The Aftermathof
- Page 25 and 26: 8 Christine Skelton, Schooling theB
- Page 27 and 28: 1 See www.education.gov.uk/b0065507
- Page 29 and 30: 13 Barbara Fredrickson, ‘Therole
- Page 31 and 32: 6. Education forsustainabilityTeres
- Page 33 and 34: well as cognitively. Real understan
- Page 35 and 36: 7. Schools fordemocracyMichael Fiel
- Page 37 and 38: and joyful relations between person
- Page 39 and 40: 8 Wilfred Carr and AnthonyHartnett,
- Page 41: 1 Winston Churchill, quoted inNIACE
- Page 45 and 46: 1 The Learning Age: A Renaissancefo
- Page 47 and 48: nities, and not have the public-pri
- Page 49 and 50: 4 Engineering flexibility: a system
- Page 51 and 52: other countries to require their re
- Page 53 and 54: 6. Remember that many of the outcom
- Page 55 and 56: 2 Adrian Elliott, State SchoolsSinc
- Page 57 and 58: 4 Peter Hyman, ‘Fear on the front
- Page 59 and 60: 12. Rethinking thecomprehensive ide
- Page 61 and 62: training, be part of a local system
- Page 64: About CompassCompass is the democra