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Research and development in adult education: some tentative thoughts
Professor Alan Rogers, The New University of Ulster
Introduction
My theme today concerns research and development in the field of post-initial education. I want to suggest that development in the education of adults has got out of step with research; that not only has development occurred without a research base, in fact it threatens to undermine research and thus to place bodies like SCUTREA under threat of irrelevancy.
But before I start on this somewhat inchoate task, I would wish to utter a few caveats (and with them apologies). First, I am not at all sure that I am the right person to be delivering this address. For the last 15 months I have been deeply involved in what I increasingly see as a battle, and I therefore find it hard to stand back and look at the war as a whole. I do not possess the necessary conceptual framework to cope in this situation; an historian’s training is woefully inadequate! Further, my situation has deprived me of the time and opportunity to engage either in detailed research or indeed in the lengthy process of maturing judgements for this task; and the location in which I find myself means that I am not always acquainted with what is in fact being done. What follows then is a series of questions aroused in the mind of one who is finding that basic assumptions about adult education are being challenged every day and that traditional answers no longer always seem to be satisfactory.
1. Recent developments
It is, I would think, not necessary to spell out in detail what appears to be happening in the field of adult education today; we all know it. Let me however highlight a few things briefly and expand on them later:
a) There seems to be a greater awareness that post-initial education matters; that all education and training cannot be left to the early years alone. This view is no longer the doctrine of the few educational missionaries, enjoying their sense of isolation and martyrdom; rather the Empire has apparently been converted (for whatever reason) at least in dogma if not in resources.
b) A greater stress is being laid on a narrow concept of continuing education in this new awareness. (Let me get definitions out of the way - I shall from now on use ‘post-initial education’ for the whole field of the education of adults; ‘continuing education’ will be for vocational and closed group courses; ‘adult education’ will be used for the traditional socially purposive and open education. These terms will of course be expanded upon, and I don’t like them at all, but we must have some shorthand or we’ll never finish.) To repeat then my second point, there is a greater stress laid on vocational and professional courses under the title of continuing education than ever before, at the expense of the more traditional fields of adult education. Pressure to this end comes both from above (government, political parties, educationalists, firms, etc.) and from below (individuals seeking career advancement or incremental improvement).
c) There is a greater acknowledgement by educationalists and others that post-initial training and education exist in a variety of modes which before have not been regarded in this light - that there are (and have for some considerable time been) a lot of people doing it!
d) That increasingly the major providers of these forms of post-initial education and the chief movers of new developments are non-educational bodies.
i)Polarity
I want to draw attention to two features of this new burst of enthusiasm for continuing education. The first of these is that a striking polarisation has emerged (or perhaps is emerging) within the field of post-initial education. I have myself above, in dealing with definitions, suggested that I see such a polarisation in the terms often used (though I am aware that ‘continuing education’ can - and sometimes does - have an all-embracing meaning; it would be nice to know the reasons why ACACE seems to have agreed to use ‘continuing education’ in this all-embracing sense rather than the narrower sense, to what some of us see as the detriment of the term ‘adult education’).
Let me illustrate this polarisation from a list I have compiled in the last few days from a miscellaneous pile of papers on my desk, in each of which two concepts are contrasted, so that you can see that this polarisation is not a figment of my imagination but exists in many other people’s imaginations. Each statement in this list quite deliberately sets one item over against the other in either the same sentence or two succeeding sentences. The list is drawn from different contexts, and the terms often mean different things and are on occasion repetitive or contradictory, but they all share one common characteristic - they indicate a polarity in thinking about post-initial education between what is usually called ‘continuing education’ and ‘adult education’.
Two ‘opposite’ varieties of post-initial education
Continuing educationNon-continuing education
Vocational educationNon-vocational, liberal education
Post-experience workDES-supported work
PickupThe general education of adults
Demand-led continuing education in whichThe liberal tradition, needs-based;
demand leads supplyin which supply leads demand
Training: for limited purposesEducation: for wider purposes
Education for economic activities,Education for social needs,
for the good of the nationto avoid the two nations
The one increases inequalities;The other decreases inequalities;
more to those who have more to the disadvantaged
The education of adultsAdult education
The one is adaptiveThe other is for personal development
Continuing education is based onAdult education is a movement
institutions, creates a system
Work-related educationEducation for personal life
Education for workEducation for leisure
Education to increase earning capacityEducation to increase participation in
democracy
Education based on economicEducation aimed at alleviating social
concepts of developmentinequality
Education for jobsRemedial education
Education as public necessity Education as a private search for meaning
Continuing education is ‘a kind of‘Adult education is of a kind which doesn’t’
education which leads to qualifications’
This polarity can be seen in many places and often takes the form of placing the two concepts in outright opposition; in a debate in the House of Lords, reference can even be made to ‘the rivaleducation and training camps’. I quote one instance at length, for it seems to me to epitomise so much of the division which concerns us here. Elizabeth Monkhouse (and I take her as an example of a group of experienced adult educationalists whose combined opinion must be taken seriously) refers to this division when she speaks of the concept of continuing education in the ACACE Report, Continuing Education: From Policies to Practice as being:
..a system catering essentially for people who wish to continue their education from wherever they left it on a full-time basis and to take whatever courses they would have followed if they had suffered no interruption, to gain whatever qualification they require. This is indeed continuing education, and it is essential that such opportunities should exist, but it is not the whole picture. The Report is not concerned with the kind of education which is the main preoccupation of the WEA: learning characterised by a creative spirit of inquiry and by the willingness of students and tutors alike to experiment together with fresh approaches and angles of vision, beginning wherever they happen to be and ending up God knows where. It has much to say about access to existing systems but little to say about student initiative and participation inside or outside those systems.
One last set of illustrations must suffice: in a collection of essays under the general title Continuing Education published in Educational Analysis, the first essay, by Paul Bertelsen, consciously adheres to the earlier term in its title: ‘The Potential Contribution of Adult Education to the Reduction of Economic and Social Inequalities in Developing Countries’; while Professor Naomi McIntosh in the same collection sees a threatened ‘general adult education’ as the basis on which a programme of continuing education is built:
General adult education, while only forming a part of the total map of the education of adults, is such a critical part that it is difficult to see how there is any prospect of moving towards continuing education, while this subculture is under such threat
and throughout these essays the same distinction can be seen.
ACACE Reports
Something akin to this polarisation can be seen in the two ACACE Reports which have recently appeared. The appearance of the first of these, Continuing Education: From Policies to Practice, has been hailed as a ‘most significant’ event; it is ‘a major report’. I quote from the House of Lords debate on continuing education (which no doubt accounts for the more than moderate language used in these extracts):
In some ways it is more important than Russell which was restricted to adult non-vocational education. The confinement to that part of the education spectrum which we have always treated as being a poor relation was sufficient to ensure that it had little effect. The Council’s report, by contrast, is unrestricted in scale; it covers industrial training, the TOPS scheme, further education, the universities and other responsible bodies as well as private correspondence courses and voluntary bodies.
A reading of this Report in conjunction with the second ACACE paper, Adults: Their Educational Experience and Needs (on which Policies to Practice is reputedly based) reveals this discrepancy. Policies to Practice concentrates on systems, opening up existing programmes, ‘bring in’ the straying sheep, removing barriers to access, adapting the formal institutions of ‘education’ for returning adults; and throughout there can be seen an underlying assumption that education is necessary for the national good. The Needs report has a different thrust. Its use of the term ‘Adult’ in its title cannot be accidental. Work-related education features only marginally in the survey questionnaire; it deals with attitudes and self-horizons, not with institutions and systems. It seeks to probe what has been called by Lessing (in a rather different context) the ‘wantlessness’ of the (educationally) poor, the latent and often unarticulated demand which cannot be met even if all the actions proposed in Policies to Practice were implemented.
The priority of continuing education
Whatever we may think or feel about it, there can be little doubt that some sense of polarity exists. It may be expressed in different terms by different people; it may mean different things, but some sort of division within the whole field of post-initial education is seen to exist.
What is more, it would seem that increasingly the emphasis is being laid on the ‘continuing education’ aspect; this is being given primacy in the discussions. I quote again from the House of Lords’ debate:
Continuing education is a matter of great importance - indeed, of necessity. It is necessary for at least three reasons: first, to enable people to adapt to a society characterised by continuous technological, economic and social change; Secondly, for people to realise their potential, to attain personal fulfilment both in work and in recreation; and thirdly, it may also be necessary at a basic level to teach skills such as literacy or numeracy to those who, for one reason or another, are lacking them.
The order in which the reasons for developing post-initial education are given here is very revealing. Government statements tend to be more explicit - that continuing education should be developed in preference to adult education. And more generally, continuing education is beginning to monopolise the world of post-initial education. When we get to the situation that an article purporting to describe United Kingdom Adult Education in a recent publication devoted to the subject Where is Adult Education Going? can concentrate on vocational courses and entirely fails to mention ACACE at all, the trend can be seen clearly enough.
ii) The role of adult education
The second feature of this newly found enthusiasm for continuing education is that it seems to be beginning to affect adult education in several ways.
a) First, it is tending to make ‘adult education’ with its traditional concerns of social and educational deprivation and alternative patterns of learning appear to be irrelevant to the needs of the nation. ‘The central purpose of the education service’ (as Professor Sockett has put it) ‘is to shift towards a strong link with economic and cultural development’ - or so the new orthodoxy requires. Those bodies who are trying to defend the place of adult education are more and more being left behind.
b) Secondly, it is increasingly being urged that the distinctive characteristics of adult education should be abandoned. I quote:
... it will become increasingly difficult as time moves on to justify the continued implementation of two types of measures, one for adults and the other for young people preparing to enter working life.
A recent conference speaker said that ‘the differences between the needs of vocational and non-vocational teachers were more theoretical than real’ (a comment which says much for our adult education research!). The growing concept of ‘alternance training’ is accompanied by statements such as: ‘... it no longer makes sense to distinguish between youth education and adult education’.
c) But thirdly, the emphasis on continuing education is beginning to rewrite even the agenda of traditional adult education:
Where adult education is primarily going is towards the adoption of affecting people’s performance in life as its prime aim. It goes beyond a concern merely for performances in the classroom. It abandons the optimistic and often unrealistic hope that what is learned in educational settings will be transferred to other arenas of life. It is less and less motivated to provide adult education as a leisure-time opiate for those whose lives are unsatisfactory.
(And that comes from the pen of one who was for many years most active in the university adult education scene.) The stress on ‘performance’ as the objective or evaluation-criterion of the effectiveness of adult education programmes springs directly from the concerns of those who see post-initial education mainly in terms of continuing education.
Challenge to continuing education
So far, it would seem, few persons have seen fit to challenge the assumptions on which ‘continuing education’ (in this narrow sense) is based; no one has yet used the Needs Report to criticise the Policies to Practice Report, to use adult education to threaten continuing education. There would seem to be at least two major grounds on which continuing education may be challenged, its participation levels and its educational objectives. With reference to the latter, the programmes on the whole tend to confirm the existing social and economic structures and adapt the participants to them rather than equip the participants to act upon and change their environment. Although, as we shall see, some of those concerned with continuing education are intending to ‘change the roles which persons perform’, fewer ‘are convinced that a priority for (their form of) adult education is directly to enable persons to transform the ... societies and communities in which they play them’. And as for participation, UNESCO has warned that ‘equal chances for access and ... open learning opportunities do not yet eliminate inequality in the utilisation of possibilities’. Even if everything that Policies to Practice urges should be done were done, the Needs Report suggests that participation is not likely to be increased on a large enough scale. (As a parenthesis, however, we may be too concerned about participation rates; major changes in social attitudes and practice as for instance in smoking, health matters, nuclear strategy, etc., have been achieved without the aid of formal adult education programmes.)
2. Universities and research
Such a challenge might best seem to come from the universities - not just because they have been defenders of traditional adult education (indeed, this might be seen to disqualify them) but because they are or should be the nation’s independent investigative agencies challenging the basic assumptions on which policy is built. The fact that higher education is itself increasingly being affected by these new developments would seem to make it all the more urgent that universities address themselves to these questions.
Criticisms have been heard to the effect that universities on the whole have failed to develop continuing education adequately - that professional continuing education provided by the internal departments is on the whole rare (except in a few cases, such as medical education) and the work of extra-mural and adult education departments is regarded as irrelevant both to the universities and to society at large. The latter offer ‘leisure-time provision’ programmes which entirely miss the economic needs of society or the vocational interests of the adult population; to take but one case, adult education departments may provide courses for the unemployed to fill their time or improve their quality of life, but (with rare exceptions) are not called upon to offer programmes to enhance the unemployed’s prospects of employment. Those universities which have no department of adult education have similarly been accused of failing to develop continuing education adequately, as Policies to Practice reveals. Attempts to reconcile the concerns of the university for national and long-term manpower needs (higher education) and the concerns of continuing education for more local and short-term manpower needs appear to have failed.