EDUCATION FOR THE GOOD SOCIETY - Support

9 See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7958945.stm.10 Quoted from personal correspondence.tally self-organised and individual, but peoplefind they want to put a group on, but they’ve gotnowhere to do it; or they’ve got a reading groupthat doesn’t cost any money but it just needssomewhere to meet and there are 20 people thatwant to come and they don’t quite fit in anybody’sfront room. 9It was admirable that the Government (in ‘straitenedtimes’) found a sum of money like this forinformal learning and that a minister was willingto defend a vision of education broader than‘qualifications for work’ (while acknowledgingthat such qualifications are important). Yet thisdefence of the policy is unsatisfactory, especiallyas Simon is probed by the interviewer. It is astrikingly attenuated vision of education in whichit is either for pleasure/fun or for qualifications.Within this context it is no surprise if anythingnon-utilitarian is relegated to marginal categoriessuch as ‘informal’ or ‘leisure’ learning. It alsobecomes apparent that there is a hierarchicaldistinction at work. The ‘lower skilled’ need qualificationsto get ‘back into work’, while informallearning is resolutely middle class. It operatesas a consolation for those who can no longerafford their second home or whose front room isnot large enough for their aspirations. Informallearning is ‘fundamentally self-organised andindividual’ and ‘self-directed’, designed to help‘people to do more of things that they already do’and it is definitely not ‘about the Governmentsetting up courses for people’. Indeed, what ismost striking about this description of the fund ishow much it resembles the aims of, and tensionswithin, the Big Society.How else might we talk about adulteducation?What is missing here? How else might we talkabout adult education? Jon Cruddas has written:What interests me is why we have lost that senseof education and a broader sense of fulfilment,self-realisation, human flourishing – which wasalso central to the democratic socialist tradition.Knowledge was everything and was [a] rich partof the working class socialist experience. Nowwhere did all that go? 10The language and tradition highlighted byCruddas are absent in Simon’s account of adultlearning. Simon gives no sense of educationfor the public good or for a social purpose;of its benefits to families and communities, aswell as to the individual; of the transformativepower of education’s implicit benefits for theindividual, such as in renewed confidence ora changed worldview; or of skills that are notjust for work. Nor is there a sense of how adulteducation can be transformative when it bringstogether students from wildly different social andeducational backgrounds. There is also, as ever, aconfusion of ends and means. We seem to haveforgotten that qualifications (sometimes) help usto measure what is valuable in education but arenot the value in themselves.How can we understand the value of adulteducation? We talk too easily sometimes of‘education for its own sake’, which risks makingit sounds as though it exists apart from humanconcerns. Similarly, we may forget that the kindof economic transformation that education canfacilitate should be utilised to create better humanlives, not as an end to which such lives might besacrificed. I have come across many students, oncourses for a qualification and those for ‘leisure’,who were seeking to re-make their lives throughadult education: as they recovered from mentalor physical ill health, or a period of caring fora loved one; to make up for an unhappy schoolexperience or a turbulent young life; to changecareer or after a period of unemployment; inorder to have a place to think in, outside work,or to gain a new skill that was not for their job;to adjust to life as a single parent; to re-makethemselves after a period in prison; to understandtheir own racial, religious or cultural heritage; orwith a sense of urgent need that they could notimmediately articulate.Education is the process by which we makeand re-make a sense of our lives, of the world andour part in it. It should be part of how we make aGood Society. Only if a wide range of opportunitiesfor adults exists, in all sectors, can educationfulfil its radical and transformative potential, tochange individual lives and also to challenge thehierarchies and assumptions within which we allexist.There is enormous scope for debate about whatforms of adult education provision are needed or42 | www.compassonline.org.uk