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Editorial

Volume 33, Number 1, April 2001

Back to the future
Richard Edwards, University of Stirling

The search for 'the new' seems to be to the forefront in many areas of policy, politics and organisational life. Newness is a sign of vigour and forward-thinking. It invokes a break with tradition, where the latter is constructed as a constraint on people's lives and opportunities. Whether it is in the language of innovation, enterprise, or even quality, the search for new, improved ways of doing things and representing what one is doing, is suggestive of the requirement to look forward, not back. Thus, in the United Kingdom, there has been the New Right, followed by New Labour. The current Labour government went so far as to sub-title its Green Paper on lifelong learning 'a renaissance for a new Britain'. The association of a new Britain with the renaissance would seem like a deliberate attempt to present a very positive view of the new. The new is good for us and the old bad. It is a sign of progress and contributes to things only getting better.

None of this is itself new, of course. The pursuit of the new has been  argued, influentially if controversially, by the British sociologist Anthony Giddens, to be inherent in modernity. Whether or not one considers the contemporary period to be late modern, reflexively modern, postmodern, or none or all of these, inherent in each framing is the rush to the new. Giddens has called modernity a juggernaut, with all that is implied in that term of the challenges associated with turning it in different directions, given its speed, momentum and a degree of uncertainty and complexity as to how it is being driven.

The link between the new and progress has been the subject of critique for at least a century and a half. Writers such as Marx, Durkheim and Weber pointed to the darker side of modernity - insecurity, poverty and oppression - as did the social reformers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, often such critiques were themselves working within a modernist logic. Strategies for improving and/or overcoming the negative aspects of modernity through reform or revolution were posited. In other words, there was not a rejection of the pursuit of the new, but an alternative perspective on what was to be pursued and how it was to be achieved. Strategies were insufficiently new or progressive. The new therefore continued and continues to be an important legitimation device, one that educators of adults have also used.

Obviously, it is too crude to posit an absolute distinction between the traditional and the past on one side and the new and the future on the other, with us stuck in the middle. However, it has a powerful rhetorical appeal. Many draw upon traditions to posit a particular vision of the future and what needs to be done for that to be achieved. Also, some use tradition as a way of trying to buttress themselves against the particular visions of the future that are powerful. The information age, globalisation and knowledge economy are not everyone's view of how the future should be, for instance.

What has this to do with the education of adults? As Editor of this journal, I see and read a lot of papers. As a result, I am perplexed and constantly challenged, wondering about what constitutes the knowledge base  in research and scholarship in the education of adults. While, for some, there may be a fairly stable tradition of adult education scholarship that draws upon a certain contested 'canon' of writers, there is also a significant pursuit of the new. This usually draws on writers outside the subject domain of the education of adults. In other words, the juggernaut of modernity and the pursuit of the new can also be found in the writing on the education of adults. Ironically, this might be said to be most prevalent in those who write about the postmodern - something in which I have a personal interest and stake - although even the latter has a tradition of thought and scholarship underpinning it. However, the pursuit of the new in scholarship is wider than this in my opinion. I would also suggest that with it there sometimes come costs. In some writing, there can appear to be the rejection, or worse a complete lack, of engagement with intellectual and practice traditions that can help us to engage in the present for the future, in which the new is neither unconditionally progressive, nor deeply regressive, but fundamentally ambivalent. 

It is the selection of articles for this edition of Studies that has set me pondering on the above, as in different ways, each draws in important traditions to help inform our understanding of contemporary practices in the education of adults. They provide new insights and perspectives into a range of issues, but draw upon varying traditions within the study of the education of adults.

Ralf St Clair draws upon the works of Bernstein and Bourdieu to provide the theoretical framing for his analysis of the curriculum negotiations within an employment preparation programme in Canada. Both writers are important for certain traditions within the study of the education of adults - and indeed Bourdieu is fundamental to engaging in contemporary debates about social capital - but they are much neglected in a lot of the literature.  And where they are drawn upon, it is often at a superficial level, ignoring the pros, cons and complexities of their writings. Similarly, with the work of Habermas, whose ideas have been influential in certain branches of adult education. In his article, Michael Welton provides an elucidation of Habermas' more recent writings and their implications for adult educators.  The encounter between Habermasian analysis and the contemporary policy and practice contexts remains a difficult space to occupy. 

A different tradition is drawn upon by David Beckett and Gayle Morris. They combine philosophical enquiry with empirical research in Australia to argue for the centrality of the body and ontology in understanding adult learning. They are critiquing the Cartesian mind/body distinction and the emphasis on epistemology in Western traditions of education. They draw upon an alternative tradition, which has found strong expression in strands of contemporary femininst writing to frame their argument. Questions of the body and ontology are not new in themselves, but their implications for notions of practice provide an interesting counter-balance to concerns for epistemology and truth.

Nick Frost and Richard Taylor draw upon a different type of tradition to examine the pros and cons of the spread of work-related learning in university education as part of the development of lifelong learning. This tradition is of radical, social purpose education, which draws upon certain values and beliefs in the role education can play in helping to overcome oppression and exploitation. Their concern is with the particular directions in which lifelong learning is being steered. Concern over the effects of innovation in higher education in South Africa is also the focus of the article by Jane Castle and Gillian Attwood. They draw upon their experience of developing a Recognition of Prior Learning project to examine the 'muddle, inconsistency and contradictions' that evolved. Their concern is that the focus of RPL work is on credit rather than access, so that its progressive potential is undermined. The concern for social and political progress is an important strand in the traditions of adult education. Some may see it as the core tradition. However, the notion of progress here is often highly abstract - emancipation, empowerment, for example - rather than firmly embedded and embodied. It can also be unself-critical about the values espoused - one can be radical in very different ways and for very different purposes.

Thus, we see that these articles in different ways draw upon different traditions of writing and action. However, even as they do, there is also an immanent notion of the progressive and the new within them. There is no tidy linearity in these positions, but eruptions and enfoldings within the present of traditions and the new, the past and future, wherein progress is not always what it is cracked up to be...

I am often asked about the submission and rejection rates for Studies. I have just done an analysis for the year 2000. During the course of the year, we received 23 articles for review: 13 from Europe (overwhelmingly the UK); 6 from North America; 2 from Africa; and 2 from Australasia. Fifteen of those articles were rejected following refereeing. Eight articles were accepted for publication, subject to amendment: 3 from Europe; 3 from North America; 1 from Africa; and 1 from Australasia. The first author of 10 articles was female, of which 3 were acceptable. Of the 13 articles first authored by a male, 5 were acceptable. Some of these will be published in the 2001 volume of Studies. In the 2000 volume we published

16 articles: 10 from Europe; 2 from North America; 2 from Africa; 2 from Australasia. Ten of these were first authored by women. Readers might interpret this as meaning that Studies is over-rigorous in its refereeing processes. However, in an earlier Editorial, I commented on my own general concern about quality and the analysis for 2000 suggests too many articles are being submitted at too early a stage of development. Perhaps this is itself part of the rush to the new, the moving on to the next article to be written and published in our performative times. Traditions of slower scholarship might be difficult to sustain against the juggernaut of the audit society and its ever-pervasive measurement of quality and outcomes, but I would suggest it is something that should be considered.