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Editor's Letter - September 2006

“When every young person who stays on in education displaces ten adult learning opportunities, casualties are inevitable among under-represented groups”

Conversation, both within and between nations, seems in increasingly short supply. Yet, more than ever, we need it. While, on the global stage, long-standing hatreds continue to simmer, occasionally reaching a terrible boiling point, day-to-day we often seem to lack the means, the vocabulary, to make our local, regional and national voices register on the political radar. How do we begin to talk to those whose vocabulary of values appears incompatible with our own?

This issue of Adults Learning reflects both on what happens when differences become so polarised that common values seem impossible to find and on how we can begin to talk, across sectors and outside our usual boxes, about the funding pressures on adult learning and the need for a new, long-term, settlement.

Earlier this year, NIACE launched a ‘Big Conversation’ about the need for a new funding settlement for adult learning. This month, it reaches its climax with aseries of high-profile meetings and debates. As Alan Tuckett writes in his Commentary, few believe that the current balance of investment between vocation-al adult education and liberal adult education is the right one. When every young person who stays on in education displaces ten adult learning opportunities, heexplains, casualties are inevitable, particularly among under-represented groups. Itis hard, therefore, to see how the current balance of spending furthers both the eco-nomic and social inclusion aims of government.

To help focus the debate we invited Bill Rammell, Minister for Further andHigher Education, John Hayes, Conservative Shadow Minister for Vocational Education, and Sarah Teather, Shadow Liberal Democrat Education Secretary, toset out their parties’ positions. We also asked a number of writers to consider theperspectives of some of the groups currently under-represented in public debate,including part-time and temporary workers, migrants, older workers and peopleon welfare benefits. We trust readers will continue the ‘conversation’ in these pages.

The philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah, another contributor to this issue, talks, in his book, Cosmopolitanism, of a second, ‘older’ meaning of ‘conversation’, ‘of living together, association’, of the development of ‘habits of co-existence’. Keith Hammond’s account of life in a Palestinian refugee camp is a stark reminder of how differences can harden when there is no ‘conversation across boundaries’.

Hammond describes how education is kept alive in the occupied territories, in circumstances most of us would find unthinkable. His account also demonstrates how easily Appiah’s habits of co-existence can be lost.

As Appiah suggests, conversation needn’t imply a shared set of values, but it does require some degree of mutual respect. Good conversations are seldom one-sided affairs. They only happen when both sides are prepared to listen, to shift and to cede ground. Once all that is granted, we are likely to find that we have more in common than we think.

Paul Stanistreet, Editor, Adults Learning