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Editor's Letter - March 2007

“A lifelong learning strategy has to subsume a skills strategy”

In a parliamentary democracy, writes Michael Newman in this month’s Adults Learning, there are two kinds of public dialogue between citizens and their leaders: the formal one that takes place during election campaigns; and the informal one between elections where people continue to press their points of view, whether through the media, by petitioning and lobbying, or through public demonstration. The assumption is that when the strength of public opinion reaches a certain level, leaders must take notice.

As much as we might cling to a belief that this form of public dialogue continues to flourish, Newman argues, ministers’ total disregard of mass public opposition to the war in Iraq ‘announced that they had abandoned the duty to attentively and constantly listen to the people who elected them’.

Protests against the invasion included a 350,000-strong demonstration in the centre of Sydney, in Newman’s native Australia. In 1792 the same number of people in Britain signed a petition calling for the end of the slave trade. Unlike their modern-day Australian counterparts, the petitioners – including many men and women who had no vote – were successful. In March 1807, after 15 years of obstruction by the House of Lords, Parliament passed a bill outlawing the slave trade in the British colonies.

Despite the entrenched opposition of church and state, support for abolition swept the country, giving birth to the first mass political campaign. Others followed, gradually enlarging the political community to include women, workingmen and other marginalised groups. The story of citizenship in this country can be read as the story of such groups’ struggles and achievements.

However, for Newman, something significant has changed over the past few years. An important right, he says, has been ‘spirited away’. What has this to do with adult education? According to Newman, while no-one would expect adult educators to single-handedly put the world to rights, they, like other concerned people, have a responsibility to make use of whatever skills they have ‘to help re-establish a democracy constructed on open, frank and continuing public dialogue’:

Whether we teach pottery, history, job-seeking or web-design, whether we are in nonvocational adult education, human resource development, further education, university teaching, industrial training or trade union training, we can take every opportunity to examine and practise the skills needed to engage in dialogue with our leaders.

In particular, Newman writes, adult educators should encourage learners to critically appraise the statements of others; to think clearly for themselves; to think inventively; to participate actively in the affairs of state; and to participate wisely. By developing such skills we can begin to ‘drag our leaders back into an open dialogue with their citizens in which both parties commit to civility in the process and to civilized outcomes’.

As Richard Hooper suggests elsewhere in this issue, much needs to be done to realise our potential as learning and civic communities. Too much is being lost in the Government’s prioritising of adult learning for skills above all other purposes. What we need, he writes, is ‘a learning-for-life vision’, a ‘national strategy for lifelong learning of which employer-focused skills acquisition is not a separate but a complementary provision … [a] lifelong learning strategy has to subsume a skills strategy’. Now that sounds a proper topic for a frank, open public dialogue. But it will require ministers to subject to scrutiny some of their most cherished assumptions.

 Paul Stanistreet, Editor, Adults Learning