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Holding up the mirror: reflections of the education of adults through the pages of Adult Education 1950-1970

William R. Jones, University of Southampton

From 1927 until its demise in the 1980s Adult Education was for most of its life the major journal of the profession. This paper considers a specific period in the life of this journal - the two decades which form the immediate prehistory of SCUTREA, 1950-1970. The purpose is not to rehearse the history of the profession, its policies or practice in those years, but to consider the reflection of some aspects of that history in the pages of the journal, and to dwell a little on the inferences we can draw from the language used by the editors and contributors.

The first impression is that the Fifties began with a sense of mid-century and of uncertainty. The first issue of Adult Education for 1950 contains as its principal article: ‘1950 - A New Dispensation’ intended to inaugurate ‘this new year at the turn of the century’. Written by Guy Hunter, the warden of Urchfont Manor - one of the new breed of short-term residential colleges - this is by any account a remarkable piece. Here is an example:

We have fallen low as it is, we scour the country trying to tempt the doubtful customer into our classes; and we face the uphill task of re-establishing the reputation of education as something for which to give up precious time and sacrifice precious money, rather than as an amusement condescendingly attended provided that the lecturer is not too dull.[1]

Hunter has no doubts as to the centrality of the adult educator, and the magnitude of the social mission ahead:

nothing less than to re-awaken faith in civilisation itself and to widen and deepen it throughout a huge society.[2]

Hunter’s discourse is most interesting, and reveals how close 1950 could feel to the evangelical early days of the profession. His eloquence encompasses rhetorical questions (‘Is the foreman to become at one bound a philosopher?’) and classic claims for the unifying virtues of liberal education:

The humanities are, I believe, a philosophic criticism of all departments of life, including an engineering works.[3]

Alongside this evangelicism this issue is much concerned with the perceived urgent need for a factual base for the study of provision. The Editorial is insistent on this: ‘This sort of factual analysis is badly needed...we hope that other people (will) undertake the same sort of work’. The work referred to was a survey by W E Styler of two years’ programmes in the Manchester Extra-Mural Department, analysing enrolments by age and choice of subject. The figures are interesting - in a programme of social sciences, arts and some science (biology, psychology) a slight majority of male students is reported. The conclusions drawn emphasise the decline in ‘educationally underprivileged’ students.

The volumes of Adult Education in the early Fifties are revealing in various ways. There is a regular feature on reports on classroom experience and innovation from tutors. Its title of ‘News From the Field’ is I think highly illuminating in its hint of a metaphor of field staff ‘out there’ somehow getting their reports back to London Centre. But then the War had only been over for a few years, and post-war reconstruction was the order of the day. Articles on practice invariably refer to both student and tutor as ‘he’ - an unvarying use of male gender language which casts a quaintness over the whole. The following is a typical example:

to stimulate him into finding his own bridges between the separate ‘subjects’ which he finds in his head.[4]

Elsewhere in the Fifties issues of the journal are sprinklings of wonderful idiosyncratic writing. In an article entitled ‘Poetry for a Naval Audience’ the author ‘A Staff Tutor’ describes an experiment in bringing poetry to ‘a conscripted audience’ in which ‘ratings outnumbered Wrens about six to one’. He reads poems to the students ‘as well as a smoker’s throat permitted’ and gets them voting on the relative merits of Marvell’s ‘Coy Mistress’ and Herrick’s ‘Gather ye Rosebuds’[5].

A great charm of Adult Education in these years is its cheerfully eclectic editorial practice. Items of news and personalia are interspersed; there is the occasional real surprise such as the text of a student essay or a snatch of verse; reviews in this decade are likely to be of subject-specialist texts which might be useful in book boxes. This editorial good nature is nicely expressed in 1952 in a reflection on the 25th year of publication:

We need to have our hearts lifted as well as our minds cleared, and we should be dull indeed without the stir of controversy and the boldness of speculation.[6]

It is, by coincidence, in that same issue that the most significant controversy of the Fifties surfaces. Christened ‘the Great Debate’ by Ross Waller in an article the following year, the tone of this famous dispute, begun by Raybould in 1951, is excellently preserved in Adult Education, and for readers in 1995 has a curious familiarity, since the heart of the debate was definition of university quality and the maintaining of standards.

Robert Peers, Director and DVC at Nottingham, contributed an article opposing Raybould’s claim of the superiority of the three-year tutorial class. Peers’ prose does not lend itself to passion or flourish, but he does end his piece with a significant claim:

Adult education is no longer to be regarded as the last resource of the educationally under-privileged, but as the new hope of an educated democracy.[7]

Raybould replied in the next issue, arguing with vehemence against Peers, and challenging his own notions of quality. He attacks Peers on his own ground - how can he really believe his Nottingham part-time tutors are of real ‘quality’?

How is it possible for men and women who besides taking extra-mural classes in a part-time capacity also presumably hold full-time appointments in other walks of life, and in many cases have domestic and other responsibilities, to keep ‘in touch with the development of their own subject’...?[8]

For the following issue Waller is persuaded to play the referee ‘with some reluctance and only at the editor’s request.’ He plays his role deftly, and as an English Literature specialist effortlessly finds the Fair Field Full of Folk in Piers Plowman when in need of an image for adult education, especially the line

‘And a lady lovely to look on came from that castle down.’

The castle is the University and the lady is Truth ‘the lamp, touchstone and criterion of the Universities’ work.’[9]

Another debate whose rhetoric is preserved in Adult Education came later in the decade, immediately after the Ashby Report on funding. Ashby had in J.A. Blyth’s words ‘broken with the tradition that only liberal education would be supported by the State’[10]. Eric Ashby himself, after the publication of the Report, wrote with candour about his belief in the creativity of technology:

To rave about Gothic churches and Tudor town halls and not even glance at Viscount aeroplanes and stressed concrete bridges cannot be justified.[11]

To some this was an assault on the canon of adult education just as Peers had assaulted the canonical status of the tutorial class. Harold Wiltshire, the protagonist, defines the Great Tradition thus:

its interest is not in learning for learning’s sake but in learning as a means of understanding the great issues of life, and its typical student is not the scholar, the solitary, the scientist or the saint: its typical student is the reflective citizen.[12]

Wiltshire’s impassioned language places him in what seems to me to be an interesting relationship both with the essential conservatism of Raybould’s discourse, and yet with the educated democracy of Peers. Certainly his title is highly self-consciously borrowed from Leavis, that other and more notorious custodian of true cultural values.

This is the age of the adult educator with a literary training, and time and again I find an intriguing undertow tugging at my own (now less fashionable) literariness. I have referred to Robert Peers’ ready citation of medieval satire. Two other examples are illuminating.

Wiltshire’s Great Tradition piece appeared in Autumn 1956; the next issue saw a riposte by Philip Collins, Dickens scholar and then Warden of Vaughan College, Leicester. Collins finds Wiltshire behind the times, especially in his disapproval of what we now call accreditation:

And if I compare a Certificate course with the average traditional class, my main impression is not of constriction as against freedom and joy (my italics); rather, I find the Certificate courses very similar to the non-certificate, except that their members tend to work harder, better and with greater continuity, and that some of them might not have attended unless a Certificate were offered.[13]

This reference to joy is very Wordsworthian. The imagination is the prime agent of human perception, and its operation produces the (elevated) feeling of Joy. or, as Wordsworth put it in ‘Tintern Abbey’:

‘While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things’ (48-50)

The Wordsworthian tone continues. Collins continues his argument in favour of certification:

Other members certainly hope that the Certificate will enable them to improve their performance in their jobs or in their voluntary activities in social or religious work...but these aims, though perhaps inferior to a disinterested love of knowledge, are by no means ignoble ...[14]

This to the literary adult educator can only suggest these lines from Book I of The Prelude, in which the poet reflects on his youthful offences against nature by bird-nesting:

‘Though mean
My object, and inglorious, yet the
end
Was not ignoble ...’

My second example is from a young research assistant at the National Institute who was to become a leading voice in the next decade as television took hold of leisure. This was Brian Groombridge, who began a major essay entitled ‘New Objectives for Adult Education’ with:

Anxiety is not the exclusive preserve of the Twentieth Century poets and novelists. When research workers fully explore the angst-ridden literature of recent years, the thorough ones will include the writings of British adult educationists in their surveys.[15]

A new vision for adult education is possible, he argues, and his tone becomes almost Messianic:

For this inspiration it would be unwise to await the coming of a Mansbridge II.[16].

The tone here is not Wordsworth but Yeats, one might think, and sure enough in the final section of his paper Groombridge finds an image from Yeats for an ageing population without educational opportunity:

‘An aged man is but a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick’ (Sailing to Byzantium, 1-2).

In the absence of the second coming of Mansbridge, Groombridge finds his own messianic - or at least revivalist - language:

Adult education will progress in the coming decades because society as a whole, and not merely segregated sections such as the underprivileged, will create problems needing the co-operation of various forms of adult education in their solution. Hitherto it has been possible for society to blunder on, leaving it to a small demi-chorus of devotees to intone eternal truths about education for life and adult education for all[17].

Groombridge is a good name for modulating into the different culture of the 1960s, where he becomes the sage of a televisual culture with which the great tradition has to come to terms. Increasingly in this bright new decade Adult Education addresses the impact of new technology: use of television broadcasts in adult teaching; closed circuit television as a teaching and training aid; the development of special broadcasts for an adult student audience, standing conferences on television viewing. And, of course, the original vision of the University of the Air grows steadily through these years into the Open University, whose Planning Committee is enthusiastically reported.

The first issue of the Sixties is prescient in its editorial policy - it is entirely given over to international contributions. From a 1990s perspective there is a strong impression of the discovery of new lands: suddenly there is a whole world out there. This is reinforced by an addition to the regular news features in the journal: ‘News From Abroad’. From a slightly shaky start with a report of the demise of the WEA in the Sudan, this feature increases in the following years, noting major initiatives in the development of adult education structures and programmes, especially in Africa. Under personalia we learn that, for example, Paul Fordham is leaving his post as resident tutor for the area of mid-Derbyshire for that of Buganda[18]; two years later he contributes an article on ‘The English Tradition’ in East Africa.

The new decade opens also with the conversion of Adult Education from a quarterly journal to one with six issues per year. The editorial explanation explains this by the rapid expansion of the whole activity, and thus the need for a more rapid turnover of comment and report. The culture is, however, changing in other ways: ‘News from the Field’ is dropped in 1966 for ‘Professional Interests’, thus losing its cold war tone. Now too we find that reviews are more likely to be of books on adult learning than on subjects for students, and to be of American rather than British authorship.

The 1960s is the decade of expansion of the curriculum. Modern languages appears, representing 3% of the national curriculum in 1962 in which year a whole issue is devoted to this topic, prefaced by an editorial proselytising on the virtues of being good Europeans. Science too gets a whole issue in 1962, revealing that the 650 courses in 1960/61 represent a doubling of provision from ten years previously.

If the fifties were characterised by debate on the supremacy of the tutorial class the sixties emerges in Adult Education as the decade of the professionalising and theorising of practice. A review of Verners’s Adult Education is illuminating:

Here is an attempt to draw out of the confusion of the field, the guesses of practitioners, and the piecemeal research available, a coherent area of study and discussion that can be called a discipline of adult education.[19]

This hammering out of a discipline with a research base is a growing phenomenon, beginning perhaps with Raymond Williams protesting at the English dislike of theory in 1961.

But one development that falls within my period - though admittedly only just - goes unreported in the pages of Adult Education. This is the foundation of SCUTREA in 1969/70. No mention is made of SCUTREA until 1974, by which time four annual conferences had taken place. The September issue of that year reports this Conference, where amid ‘admirable hospitality and sunlit gardens’ discussion proved occasionally ‘explosive’.

The end of my period for review marks not only the foundation of SCUTREA but the fragmentation of reporting and publishing into an ever-increasing number of more specialist journals. Adult Education did of course continue publication for many years, but after 1970 it lost that all-encompassing synoptic coverage which makes it so valuable a source before that date.

[1] G. Hunter (1950) 1950 - a new dedication. In Adult Education, 22, 3, p. 176

[2] G. Hunter (1950)