A note of unfashionable dissent: rediscovering the vocation of adult education in the morass of lifelong learning
Ian Martin, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 31st Annual Conference, 3-5 July 2001, University of East London
Does anyone else feel like this?
This conference is organised around the evocative theme of 'travelling' and telling stories about journeys and transitions. This paper sets out to question the purpose, direction and consequences of the movement from the allegedly bounded, modernist 'field of adult education' to the supposedly open, postmodern 'moorland of adult learning' (Usher, Bryant and Johnston 1997).
My own journey through education - in Scotland, England and overseas - has taken me from school teaching to traditional university extra-mural work, from continuing education to professional development, and from community education to lifelong learning - and always, and inexorably, back to adult education. Why is this? What explains the stubborn circularity of this trajectory? What my experience suggests to me is that, although 'we make the road by walking', the compass bearings of the route we choose to take are, in a sense, already there; and that while some things change - and, certainly, the words we use to describe them seem to change all the time - other things, in a fundamental and incontrovertible way, do not. In other words, there are certain abiding truths and non-negotiable realities about a particular understanding of adult education conceived and embraced as a vocation. These are simply not up for grabs - whatever else may be.
Of course, there are many different kinds of adult education, but this argument proceeds from one distinctive historical tradition and ideological position. This has always stood for a notion of an adult education which is overtly political and partisan in the sense that it takes the side of particular social interests and political actors - and thus, inevitably, stands against certain others. The latter, whatever we choose to call them, represent those ubiquitous ideological and economic forces, now instantiated in the global market, which seek to dominate, oppress and exploit ordinary people by turning them into the producers of other people's power, profit and privilege. These are also the forces which, I would contend, are now hegemonic within the current construction of lifelong learning as a universalised 'learning to labour'. This is not to deny that there are other more palatable and progressive versions of lifelong learning; it is simply to argue that, if these claim to stand for human flourishing and social justice, they may be in danger of fiddling while Rome burns.
On this view, what is called for is not a dreary trek of self-abnegation from the field of adult education to the moorland of lifelong learning, but rather a vigorous reassertion and active reclaiming of the notion of adult education as a critical and creative vocation - a vocation which is systematically informed by a political analysis and seriously committed to a social purpose. It seems that, in the current era of lifelong learning, such an adult education must, indeed, remain a dissenting vocation.
Social purpose: what it means and why it matters
This paper reflects a growing sense of unease about the demise of the adult educator as a normative practitioner and agent of social change (as distinct from facilitator of individual learning) within the dominant discourse of lifelong learning. What is going on here? What is being put in and taken out? What can we do to rescue adult education as a vocation, ie as the work we choose to do as distinct from the job we have to do? One thing seems sure: no one else is likely to take much interest - they are all too busy asking the wrong questions.
The apparently inexorable logic of the current politics of publication and research is to draw us away from the messy business of social and political engagement towards the more fertile and fashionable pastures of technical and intellectual disengagement: in number crunching surveys of 'participation' and 'access' (when surely the prior question is, in what, to what and on whose terms?), increasingly bland and sanitised packages of continuing education and professional development (when surely the prior question is, for whom and in whose interests?), earnest assertions of the importance of social capital in building the learning society (when surely the prior question is, what destroys the norms and networks of trust in communities?), or the ludic temporising of certain kinds of postmodern 'theorising' which seems so privileged, effete or simply out of touch with most people's social reality, postmodern or otherwise (when surely the prior question is, what does all this really amount to, why bother?).
I suppose what I find troubling is the separation of the process of learning from the intentions of teaching. For me, it all began with the collection Adult learning, critical intelligence and social change (1995), edited by Marjorie Mayo and Jane Thompson. I co-authored a chapter for that book - a book which was meant to do for the mid-1990s what (the still important) Adult education for a change (1980),edited by Jane Thompson, did for the 1980s. And, as it turned out, didn't we need it? The point is that it was not until I received my complimentary copy of the 1995 book that I found the word 'education' in its title had been replaced by 'learning'. Apparently, the publisher had decided that this late substitution would increase the book's market appeal and sell more copies. But, in a sense, it epitomised what was going wrong. Look at the earlier book and you will find (whatever its faults) a tightness of argument, a clarity of analysis and a sense of purpose which is simply not there in the later book (whatever its strengths). Of course, this was a sign of the times: by the middle of the 1990s we had lost much of our conviction and most of our coherence - so learning was 'good enough', it would do.
· The social purpose tradition has always stood for purposeful educational intervention in the interests of social and political change: change towards more social justice, more equality and more democracy. We need it in these muddled, late modern times as much as we ever did; it is part of an historic struggle that continues to this day. Briefly, social purpose adult education can be characterised as follows:
· adult students/learners are treated as citizens and social actors
· curriculum reflects shared social and political interests
· knowledge is actively and purposefully constructed to advance these collective interests
· pedagogy is based on dialogue rather than transmission
· adult education exists in symbiotic relationship to social movements
· critical understanding leads to social action and political engagement
· education is always a key resource in the broader struggle for democracy.
It should be emphasised that variants of what Keith Jackson (1995) calls this 'adult education of engagement' exist in almost all countries and cultures. For example, Michael Collins (1991), in a systematic attempt to integrate and enrich this tradition across continents, uses North American, British and Western European intellectual and historical sources, deliberately seeking to reappropriate the term 'liberal' from the right, to reconnect with its radical roots and to argue that it remains a crucial resource for the 'critical role' of adult education perceived and pursued as a vocation: ... a vocation of adult education has nothing to lose in creating critical discourses and pedagogical strategies that aim to honour, at the very least, and preserve traditional liberal values. These are values which have to do with justice, freedom and rationality. A transformative pedagogy would envisage their realization through actual political engagement, communicative action and genuine participatory democracy. The prevailing hegemonic arrangements now have such a subtle hold on everyday discourse that even committed adult educators feel awkward in giving voice to such aspirations and the normative language that accompanies them. However, a modern practice of adult education that takes these existing hegemonic arrangements for granted becomes readily dispensable.
Who really needs it? The corporate sector and the state can cast their nets widely for intellectual subalterns. (p 119) In the era of the globalised market system, the 'New World Order' and the TINA (There is no alternative) mindset, we sever our roots from this tradition at our peril. But this is precisely what will happen if we abandon the unashamedly political discourse of social purpose adult education for the curiously depoliticised discourse of lifelong learning.
Contesting the dominant discourse
The dominant discourse of lifelong learning can, admittedly somewhat crudely, be identified in terms of the three Ps of professionalisation, pedagogy and policy, all of which reflect and reproduce a pervasive technical rationality and ideology of individualism. It is at best indifferent and at worst hostile to the notion of adult education as a critical and unashamedly normative vocation which is informed by a social purpose. In each case, I use one key source - something I have recently read or re-read - to develop the critique.
Professionalisation
This, of course, started long before the current version of 'lifelong learning' came into vogue- although it is still worth noting the latter's more expansive precursors, eg in the Faure Report's (1972) progressive and humanistic ontology of 'Learning to Be' (as distinct from learning to have, get and do - or, alternatively, to cope or simply survive). Michael Collins, in a brilliantly sustained argument, shows how, particularly in North America, the values of professionalism have been lost to the baser currency of professionalisation and the notion of vocation jettisoned in favour of the toolkit of technique. In this sense, the seeds of the lifelong yawning version of lifelong learning were sown quite a long time ago in adult education's search for professional respectability. This seized upon a spurious positivism to spawn what Malcolm Knowles, perhaps the arch villain of the piece, so successfully peddled in the academic and corporate market placeas the 'modern practice of adult education'.
Knowles ''routinisation' in mainstream adult education thinking of the notion of the universal and unproblematic 'self-directed learner' encouraged a technicism which was based on what Collins rightly identifies as an 'excessive individualism and psychologism'. The removal of the practice of the adult educator from questions of value and purpose and the social, cultural and political contexts in which these arise was, of course, very convenient for dominant corporate and institutional interests. The focus on the self-directed individual (inevitably, perhaps, an unreconstructed white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant male) meant that the adult educator's role was reduced to merely the facilitation of learning, ie technical support. The purposes of learning no longer mattered - at any rate, they could be left to the sovereign individual or, alternatively, those who knew better (leading to the anomaly of what Collins nicely terms 'directed "self-directed learning"'). Issues of curriculum and epistemology - let alone the knowledge/ power nexus - did not even arise. It was all delightfully simple! Ironically, however, as the search for the recognition and respectability of academic and professional status 'mainstreams' the adult educator within the academy (and the market place), so it marginalises the vocation of adult education as a distinctive field of practice and cuts it off from its roots in social purpose (eg see Barr 1999). According to Collins, the price we pay for this 'ideology of technique' constitutes the crisis in modern adult education whereby it has become an 'essentially accommodative endeavour'.
Pedagogy
The technicist legacy remains alive and well today. In recent years, it has begun to thrive with particular vigour in unfamiliar territory: the academy itself - in its turbocharged, value-for-money, quality-assured manifestation. In the era of lifelong learning one version of the 'modern practice of adult education' has, indeed, become the acceptable and respectable face of institutional development in higher education. But, of course, it is not called 'adult education'; it is called 'teaching and learning'. Miriam Zukas and Janice Malcolm trace the aetiology of this mutation in their very perceptive paper, 'Pedagogies of lifelong learning: building bridges or building walls?' (Zukas and Malcolm, 2000). In our universities pedagogical technique, or 'good practice', is triumphing over social purpose - and there seems to be little we can do about it.
Adult education in the guise of lifelong learning has finally come home; it is here to stay. In my own university, for instance, we have been fighting over who 'lifelong learning' belongs to - such is its cachet! The result - for the time being - is that what was once the Department of Extra- Mural Studies (serving the wider community) and then became the Centre for Continuing Education (offering accredited courses, access routes and professional development) is now the Office of Lifelong Learning (selling its wares to the paying public and increasingly involved in marketing institutional expertise). Meanwhile, the imminent merger of the Department of Community Education and the Department of Higher Education, which was to have become the new Department of Higher Education and Lifelong Learning (HELL!), is left looking around for something else to call itself.