Editorial

for Concept Volume 16, Number 1

by Mae Shaw, Executive Editor

The articles in this issue of Concept all challenge accepted wisdom about the nature of society and the role of community education within it. Fiona Williams, in a sustained critique of the way in which ‘the family’ is framed in policy, argues that the changing reality of people’s private lives offers an opportunity to reconstruct the meaning of citizenship in a way which contributes towards ‘a more egalitarian, inclusive, interdependent and solidaristic society’. Citizenship is traditionally conceived in ways which reinforce the sexual division of labour, but Williams argues for ‘a political ethic of care’ by means of which care and attentiveness to others would constitute (and be valued as) a key contribution to society. This would, crucially, depend upon the development of wider mechanisms of deliberative democracy so that ‘those most closely involved in the care exchange were determining local agendas of care’. Williams’ argument poses a direct challenge to an occupation whose primary justification is the deepening and extending of democracy, particularly at the present time. In the changing policy context, family matters seem to have become much more central to institutional expectations of community education. The implications of this change are yet to be fully realised, but in any case the relationship between private and public spheres of citizenship remains a fruitful educational area.

Professional youth and community work is the subject of Tony Jeffs’ provocative broadside on the professionalisation of welfare. He argues that the values underpinning the welfare professions in the current context seem to be too far removed from those which motivated their Victorian founders, asking ‘why have such requisites regarding character and commitment largely been set aside and what have been the consequences?’ His own analysis suggests that the dominance of the market model, the social relationships it produces and the dispositions it encourages are a serious problem for a profession which claims to ‘serve’ the community. He calls for a renewed sense of ‘vocation and calling’ as ‘crucial counterpoints to the cash nexus, guaranteeing that the most demanding, most challenging welfare work is not left to the least qualified or committed workers’.

Arguing from rather a different point of view, Mae Shaw also takes issue with current professional preoccupations. She asserts that the managerial obsession with performance and audit leave no time for the real work of engaging educationally with people ‘which is increasingly left to casualised, low-paid sessional workers’. In particular, she focuses on the professional contradictions and challenges which emerge from the recent move towards outcome-based funding for community groups. She suggests that, unless there is a recognition of the contradictory position of community work, workers may be reduced to delivering policy outcomes which are at odds with those political outcomes which might improve the lives of the communities they serve. She calls on workers to remember their role as public servants and to reclaim ‘the capacity to express and contest professional and political purpose, not just to act as functionaries’. In our haste to itemise core skills to serve ever more precise audit mechanisms, we should not forget that those core skills which continue to make community work distinctive are ‘making the connections between the macro and micro, the public and private, the personal and political’.

Sarah Grimson explores the relationship between volunteering and radical education in the three main respects: aims, methodologies and relationships with society. Drawing on her own experience as a VSO volunteer in West Africa, she argues that they share certain common defining features. Both, she argues, use a ‘dissenting and visionary’ model of education, both are concerned with the struggle for a more just society which is controlled ‘from the bottom up’ and both are committed to transformational change. By making this comparison, Grimson is able to draw on the tradition of radical education as a resource which enhances the possibilities for social change in volunteer programmes. She sees the commitment of the volunteer as ‘giving meaning to life for both volunteer and community’. Perhaps that is an aspiration which should be extended to the work of community education professionals too. I’m sure Tony Jeffs would agree!