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Editor's Letter - May 2006

This issue of Adults Learning is published on the eve of the fifteenth annual Adult Learners’ Week. The aim of the week’s events and activities is to provide an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of adult learners and for adults to reflect on how learning might, in the future, transform their lives.

As Rachel Thomson writes in her Commentary article, it would be easy to dismiss Adult Learners’ Week as a ‘self-congratulatory fiesta’ for the great and the good of the adult learning world. But, more than anything else, these events are about learners. For a few days each year, the often very remarkable stories of adults who have used learning to change their lives for the better register on the radar of the mainstream media – reason enough for celebration, one might think.

Most of these stories relate a personal journey, sometimes from an extremely bleak place, often to the acquisition of a skill or qualification, but, almost always, to some greater sense of self-worth. Such snapshots of ‘ordinary’ struggle are valuable not only because they can give policy makers a sense of the real, not merely economic, value of adult education, but also because they can inspire others.

Across the country, these stories tell us, there are people with a real hunger to use whatever resources are available to them to transform their lives and the lives of their communities. Adult learning represents one of the best resources. Almost everywhere you look you will find people learning, whether formally or informally, to acquire the skills, knowledge and confidence to make a better life. Their examples can and do convince others to do the same.

I recently interviewed a number of this year’s Adult Learners’ Week award winners. Writing up, I was struck by how easy it is to make these stories seem superficially similar: bad school experience, no qualifications, unhappy adulthood turned around by learning. But this is to do these people a disservice. Their stories seem similar because their struggles are pretty much universal – anyone anywhere in the world could relate to them – though each individual has brought different resources to different circumstances.

What links them is that they have all used adult education as a resource in their efforts. They are not passive beneficiaries of a gift. And that is what is so encouraging about this week and the learning journeys showcased during it. They show what people can do where barriers are surmounted, where they feel they have a chance, whether that’s first, second, third or fourth. We need more chances, and more people such as these.

Paul Stanistreet, Editor, Adults Learning