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Commentary - April 2008

Truth, beauty and the meaning of life

While adult learning serves a host of agendas, we diminish it if we forget that it is valuable in its own right, says SUE MEYER

Adult educators are terrific at defence strategies. They have had to protect their provision from the depredations of a wide variety of attacks over a lengthy period of time and most have seen the same cases made for dismantling their provision several times over. They are fantastic survivors, rising phoenix-like from the ashes time after time, popping up doing the same thing with a different pot of funding and different terminology just when it seemed that the axe had finally fallen. They have a facility for guerrilla warfare, burying themselves in communities and then shooting from the sidelines at the mainstream.

A range of flexible and changing arguments have supported this spirited and successful defence. There are many justifications for public expenditure on adult learning all of which have been used over the years in differing combinations. Adult learning provides skills for work, helps remedy the failures of the school system, provides a route to social inclusion for the disenfranchised, promotes health and well being, supports democracy and helps people involve themselves in the lives of their communities. All these arguments see learning as part of the pursuit of social justice.

For the individual, there are further benefits. For the elderly, the delay of morbidity, for those with mental health issues, a chance to engage with others and to rebuild skills and interests, for the marginalised, improved confidence, and for the workless, the skills for employment and sustainable jobs. There are both economic and social benefits to learning which support government agendas across the whole range of departments – the glue that joins changing priorities to changing behaviours. Defenders of adult learning have drawn on these benefits and connections to fight their corner and to draw in new supporters to the cause. As a result, any cut in adult learning budgets can be claimed to affect government policy and any change or prioritisation can have its perverse outcomes.

The debate over the skills strategy and its priorities show the subtlety with which these arguments can be marshalled. Social justice would seem to be served by the Government’s contention that resources should be directed at equipping those with least skills to gain the necessary minimum requirement for sustainable employment but no – this prioritisation means that those with the very least will be marginalised, that education for social cohesion will be reduced and that servicing of other government agendas will be reduced. In fact, for adult educators it is possible to argue against any form of prioritisation and, indeed, such arguments are always brought into play whether as part of an ‘absolutely not’ or ‘yes, but’ approach.

Making the case in this way has had a high success rate too, leading to a softening of hard lines and playing well with the complexities of adults’ lives and varying needs. It secured non-schedule 2 status in 1992, a brief flowering in the Blunkett era, the guarantee for adult and community learning budgets, the safeguard for learning for personal and community development and has undoubtedly inspired the informal adult learning debate. So, at this juncture, anyone could be forgiven for saying where is the problem with this tried and tested approach.

My argument would be that there is a problem, although pragmatism may mean that it is insoluble. I am tired of seeing something I believe in as a good in its own right being justified only because it serves a host of other agendas – and I believe that this approach risks a narrowing of the focus and content of adult learning on offer.

I believe that adult learning is valuable for its own sake and I agree with the 1919 Adult Education Committee final report when it asserts that ‘freedom of choice of subject and freedom of discussion are indispensable… the very fact that there are conflicts of view upon the problems of social life and organisation… is a strong reason for study and the fullest discussion’. This, I believe, is what we should be asserting the need for in a modern and changing Britain.

As the Government continues its consultation on the future of informal learning I think we should stop justifying our learning as helping the government achieve its aims and start arguing for it as the route by which individuals can grow, change and develop. The 1919 report was great on what was appropriate for the state and for the voluntary bodies. Voluntary organisations, it argued, were needed ‘to counteract the sterilising effects inherent in organised education and to safeguard the freedom of both students and teachers’. We would do well to remember this need for independence and freedom as we see the state looking for ways to connect with what people do in their own time and with their own resources. We have defended education and, by doing so, attached it to state agendas. Let’s make sure there is a corner left that enables us to argue with each other and the state in the search for truth, beauty and the meaning of life.

Sue Meyer is Director for Programmes and Policy, NIACE

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