Adult learning in the changing countryside: an agenda for adult education
John H. Payne
University of Cambridge
Board of Continuing Education and U.A.C.E. Rural Network
Conference on Rural Participation in Continuing Education
27th March 1997
Madingley Hall, Madingley, Cambridge
In this keynote address to a conference on Rural Participation in Adult and Continuing Education, held in Cambridge on 23rd March 1997, I review change in rural areas and make some modest proposals for an adult education response to these changes. The analysis of change is set within the theoretical context of reflexive modernity, as developed by Beck, Giddens and Lash. I argue that participation patterns in rural areas are not dissimilar to those in urban areas, with many of the same problems of access and inequity. At the same time there are specific spatial barriers to participation in rural areas related to low population densities and population dispersal which have to be confronted. The promotion of social inclusion should be regarded as the policy objective of adult education in rural and urban areas.
I conclude that the principles that need to be taken account of include leadership, partnership, funding, progression, information technology, guidance, negotiation and democracy. I also include a proposal for local control of learning activities which would supersede the current use of outreach models of provision in rural areas.
Key terms: Adult education, adult learning, participation, rural, policy, reflexive modernity, social inclusion.
I want to start this presentation by putting forward four propositions which underlie my talk.
1.I suggest that the very notion of 'the rural' is anachronistic.
2.At the same time, it remains a powerful and evocative construct, with specific ideological overlays. It is one of the ways in which individually and collectively people try to make sense of the world they live in.
3.But the concept of the rural can also obscure other issues which are important factors inhibiting participation in adult learning in the communities we serve.
4.A policy response must start from the lives and interests of people living in rural areas, but involve as well our own view of adult education as a force for social inclusion.
Throughout the talk, I shall make use of concepts such as tradition and modernity. For the sake of those who want to follow up this theoretical framework more closely, I have limited myself to references from one volume (Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive modernization, 1994)
It is perhaps appropriate that as a Westcountryman, born and brought up in Somerset, I should begin not with a quotation from urban intellectuals, but with a quotation from Thomas Hardy. In a preface to Far from the Madding Crowd, dated 1895 - 1902, he writes of the anachronistic view of 'Wessex' which his early novels promoted:
... the press and the public were kind enough to welcome the fanciful plan, and willingly joined me in the anachronism of imagining a Wessex population living under Queen Victoria; - a modern Wessex of railways, the penny post, mowing and reaping machines, union workhouses, Lucifer matches, labourers who could read and write, and National school children ...
He refers to the material changes in the countryside and the cultural results of those changes:
The change at the root of this has been the recent supplanting of the class of stationary cottagers, who carried on the local traditions and humours, by a population of more or less migratory labourers, which has led to a break of continuity in local history, more fatal than any other thing to the preservation of legend, folklore, close inter-social relations, and eccentric individualities. For these the indispensable conditions of existence are attachment to the soil of one particular spot by generation after generation.
The dislocated lives of Hardy's later characters, Tess and Jude, are examples of a wider social dislocation. It is the very unromantic England which Flora Thompson describes in Lark Rise to Candleford. If we turn to more academic records, we can read detailed histories, both local and national, of the appalling conditions in which rural labourers lived. And of course there was resistance to these processes. The Swing riots of the 1830s led in particular to attacks on the new farm machinery which was making many rural labourers redundant. Later in the century, farm labourers began to organise. I am grateful to Alan Tuckett, Director of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) for the following story about William Morris and the Socialist League:
'In 1885 in Norwich they had a very active, second largest Socialist League branch . I mean, they kind of harangued the poor populace of Norwich and then on Sunday mornings (they would) go out and harangue the populace of Horsham St Faiths. They did this for about two years and then it petered out, in the way of lots of progressive social initiatives. And seemingly nothing happened, no obvious outcomes, a waste of time really. Seven years later, it was in Horsham St Faiths that the National Union of Agricultural Workers got founded after 100 years of attempts to create a general workers' union for agricultural workers that would stick.' (Interview, 4th December 1996)
It is clear, then, that the 19th century saw the definitive break-up of a traditional way of life based on agricultural work, close inter-social relations, and local traditions and customs. Yet here we are, 100 years later, still talking about 'the rural' as if it means anything at all. Well, does it? Let's begin to look at some of the evidence. Let's look first of all at where people live and the ways they earn their living. Now it is true that in some parts of the European Union - I am thinking in particular of inland areas of the Mediterranean countries - there are communities where most people earn their living from agriculture. Depopulation is still a problem in some of these areas. In England, by contrast, so-called 'rural' populations are increasing in virtually every part of the country; it is the great industrial towns which are losing population. Of the counties which formed the case-studies for the University of Sussex research on 'Barriers to Participation in Rural Adult Education', on which I worked together with Susan McGrath who is running one of the workshops this afternoon, East Sussex and North Yorkshire have projected population rises of between 5 and 10% (as have Norfolk and Suffolk); Cornwall is in the 10% plus group (as is Cambridgeshire). Derbyshire comes in at 0-5% increase, with some depopulation due to the government's decision to close the coal-mines.
If we turn now to jobs, we find that only 2.6% percent of the UK population earn their living from agriculture. The highest figure in England is 10.6% in Lincolnshire. There are many 'villages' in South-East England where no inhabitants work on the land! Furthermore, the nature of agricultural work itself has changed. Farmers now refer to the 'agriculture industry' and use the common business parlance of investment, return, maximising profit and so on. And as with all business, agriculture is not required to account for social costs. We are now beginning to realise that these social costs exist. This is not my specialist field and I will make only a few references which members of the audience may wish to amplify on (the conference organisers have deliberately left plenty of time for questions). These are the contamination of ground-water supplies by artificial fertilisers and pesticides, reductions in biodiversity through monocropping, and animal infections such as B.S.E. in cattle.
It is sometimes claimed that the industrialisation of agriculture is destroying Nature. Of course, this is nonsense. 'Nature' disappeared from the scene many years ago. Two friends of mine went up to Shropshire for Christmas, only to find walking restricted to dangerous lanes or claggy footpaths across ploughed fields - they were glad to get back to the rural delights of Wimbledon Common! Writing in 1883, at about the same time as Thomas Hardy, William Morris makes an appeal for careful husbandry of the 'busy lands', a phrase which I think describes the English countryside at its best. These busy lands have come to replace Nature (or at least the concept of Nature as something outside and separate from human beings. He is also making an appeal for the conservation of what little wilderness is left of the original Nature:
Yet civilization, it seems to me, owes us some compensation for the loss of this romance, which now only hangs like a dream about the country life of busy lands. To keep the air pure and the rivers clean, to take pains to keep the meadows and tillage as pleasant as reasonable use will allow them to be; to allow peaceable citizens freedom to wander where they will, so they do no hurt to garden or cornfield; nay, even to leave here and there some piece of waste or mountain sacredly free from fence or tillage as a memory of man's ruder struggles with nature in his earlier days: is it too much to ask civilization to be so far thoughtful of man's pleasure and rest, and to help as far as this her children to whom she has most often set such heavy tasks of grinding labour? Surely not an unreasonable asking. But not a whit of it shall we get under the present system of society.' (Art under Plutocracy, lecture 1883, published 1884)
Like all myths, the myth of the English countryside, which insistently conflates 'rural' with 'natural' serves a purpose. For Morris, it is used to criticise both industrial, urban squalor and the capitalist system that underpinned modern urbanisation. But for Raymond Williams, in his exhaustive account of country and city as images in English thought, it is capitalism rather than industrialism which is the target. He writes:
(The rural myth) is also a main source for that last protecting illusion in the crisis of our own time: that it is not capitalism which is injuring us, but the more isolable, more evident system of urban industrialism. (Country and City)
In his review of Williams' book, E P Thompson writes:
What was wrong with this 'myth' of rural life was that it became softened, prettified, protracted, and then taken over by city-dwellers as a major point from which to criticise 'industrialism'. Thus it became a substitute for the utopian courage of imaging (sic) how far community may have already been attained. (Persons and Polemics, 1994, p.248)
Now this becomes really interesting! I want to take Thompson two steps further. Firstly, it is precisely the case that, since the population of English rural areas began to swell again in approximately 1960 (a by-product of wide scale car ownership), these city-dwellers which Thompson refers to have increasingly become country-dwellers. And they have taken with them exactly this prettified myth of the countryside which Thompson refers to. Secondly, his reference to Utopian courage. Now both of the great Utopian books of the 1890s, Morris' News from Nowhere and Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow, refer to a new synthesis of the virtues of town and country. Morris' of course didn't happen; Howard's did, but only in a handful of places. And as John Lowerson points out in the report on the Sussex research (p.190),
... what he (Howard) did not foresee was the extent to which the remaining parts of rural England, outside his new cities, would be drawn into an urban net. What he hoped for, the disappearance of the worst parts of rural life, isolation and poor services, has not happened ...
This will bring me on, in a few moments, to the question of poverty and wealth in 'rural' areas and the linked issue of 'locals' and 'newcomers'.
However, before I do that, I want to point out that Beck, Giddens and Lash, in their collective preface to Reflexive Modernity, reach similar conclusions about the 'end of Nature'. 'If human beings once knew what 'nature' was, they do so no longer', they write. 'What is 'natural' is now so thoroughly entangled with what is 'social' that there can be nothing taken for granted about it any more. In common with many aspects of life governed by tradition, 'nature' becomes transformed into areas of action where human beings have to make practical and ethical decisions.' (vii) In the late modern world, the traditional is no longer a reliable guide to action. Reflexive modernization implies that individuals are left to create their own identities and life-stories, in a context of complementary globalization and individualisation. At the same time, as Giddens emphasises, there are new possibilities of creating social bonds, a task which he describes as 'a fraught and difficult enterprise but one also that holds out the promise of great rewards.' (107) The subject in late modernity can be collective as well as individual, a point of considerable relevance to us as adult education organisers.
All organised learning in society requires social effort, and thus I take learning to be a key way in which both individuals and communities 'go on' in the late modern world with its many risks and possibilities. Take the Open University, for example. At first glance, the O.U. student in her isolated rural cottage studies with little reference to anyone else around her. But take a closer look: she receives regular mailings from the Great Machine at Milton Keynes, she sends in her assignments via the Post Office, she chats to her tutor and other students on the phone. Occasionally even she may meet other students at a tutorial in a large town 30 miles away. All this without taking account of the social effort involved in setting up and sustaining the O.U. as a Great Machine itself! Those of you in the room who are actively involved in setting up opportunities for adult learning in rural areas will no doubt be able to give many examples of the sort of thing I mean: the extra mural course in the Village Hall, the Return to Study course linked into the local primary school, the educational activities of the W.I. And it is just as true of the telecottage as of the activities in the Village Hall. Group learning is a common activity at such centres; individuals who use the centre may be preparing newsletters for local organisations or getting support for small businesses which offer local employment.
But who participates? Now, here I come to a central point. I have not seen any evidence that suggests that participation in rural areas (I am now using 'rural' in a non-ideological way to refer to people living in areas with low population densities) - are any different from that in urban and suburban areas. We all know what the problems are: younger people participate more than older people, women more than men, those in higher social classes more than those in lower social classes. Above all, those with successful previous experience of education and training participate more than those who look back on their education as a time of humiliation and failure. These simple truths (all you know and all you need to know!) are still with us. For a number of years, some of our colleagues took their eye off the ball, were seduced by the fashionable talk of marketing. Adult education as a service, as an ethical endeavour informed by deep social commitment was boring - the careers and the reputations were to be made in the Brave New World of the market, with its characteristic language of managers, delivery mechanisms, market research replacing that of accountability, equal opportunities, partnership and negotiation. I think Michael Collins in Adult Education as Vocation (1991) has made the most complete statement of that position.
The promotion of social inclusion seems to me the single most important target of adult education for the year 2000 and beyond. I know Susan McGrath is going to talk about rural poverty this afternoon. Some of the figures she will produce for East Sussex, and which are included in the report of the Sussex research, are deeply shocking. They reveal how wealth and poverty co-exist in the English countryside today. And of course how even when poor people in these rural communities are motivated to learn, there remain barriers to their participation - lack of money, lack of childcare, lack of transport. And of course you know as organisers of adult learning that many of the regulations of adult education, particularly those about class size, make it very difficult indeed to set up viable groups in the deep countryside. I am sure all of our workshops will refer to that problem and how to overcome it.
In the Sussex research, I made some use of the local-newcomer model to describe what was going on in the English countryside. I referred for example to areas of Derbyshire where quarry-workers have to commute into the Dales because of lack of affordable houses: cottages have been bought up by commuters and holiday-makers. I referred to the complicated question of 'who counts' as Cornish in Cornwall. I also referred to the way in which incomers to village communities can take over local organisations and then use them for their own purposes - in particular to avoid further development in the village. This is important because of course village enlargement makes it more viable to sustain local shops, local post-offices, local adult education classes. And of course a key issue is opposition of incomers to the kind of light industrial or business developments, most of them far less environmentally damaging than agriculture, which might create local jobs for local people. It has been a curious sight to see a government totally unsure about whether to support such developments according to a 'free market' model of economic and social development or to oppose them on 'ideological' grounds as incompatible with the stereotypical images of rural England!