socialpurpose

Adult education as a social movement: inspiring change or fading dream?

Adult education has long thought of itself as a social movement. But given changes in the world of education and in the wider context of social movements, JOHN FIELD asks whether it is still meaningful to think about contemporary adult education in these terms

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All serious educational movements have in England been also social movements. They have been the expression in one sphere the training of mind and character of some distinctive conception of the life proper to man and of the kind of society in which he can best live it
R.H. Tawney, 1953

s it still meaningful to view contemporary adult education as a social movement? Sixty years after Tawneys lecture to mark the half-centenary of the Workers Educational Association, can we still claim that we have a distinctive conception of the good life, and the kind of society in which it can be achieved? Tawney was, of course, writing as a Christian and a socialist. His involvement with the WEA formed one wing of a wider platform of relationships with what he saw as the forces of progressive change. Organisationally this platform underpinned a web of adult education organisations, from the Womens Co-operative Guild through residential colleges to the Labour Colleges, as well as the educational activities of labour movement organisations, from the retail co-operatives to the trade unions. And Tawney was at the centre of this dense web of institutions and individual inter-connections. Tawneys understanding of adult education was broadly Christian socialist in nature. He encountered the WEA while living in the Toynbee Hall university settlement fellowship (William Beveridge was another resident at the same time). His conception of equality implied a broad view of education, which in turn underpinned the fellowship of equals that, in Tawneys mind, allowed all to make a common contribution based on their abilities rather than their ascribed status, and represented in living form the equality of all before God. I emphasise Tawneys Christian and socialist

thinking for a reason. It is not only that the WEA in his time was closely linked with the co-operatives, the trade unions and the Labour Party, important though this was. I also want to emphasise the importance of a whole stratum of intellectuals and thinkers from the middle and upper classes who believed that the workingclass movement was a critical element in any progressive alliance, and that the duty of an educated person was to share their learning with the future leaders of that movement. And this is where the contrast with our present situation is striking. I will take it as given that the working-class movement is not what it was. While we should not forget that there are more trade union members than when Tawney was WEA president, the numbers who are active have shrivelled; Labour Party membership has dwindled to a fraction of what it was when Tawney gave his lecture; and the co-operatives are struggling to maintain their status as a mutual movement rooted in working-class communities. But, equally important, there is no longer a signicant body of intellectuals who see the education of the workers as a crucial way of empowering progressive forces for change. This must have implications for the world of adult learning. This was recognised recently in Canada, where a number of adult educators have debated the future of our eld. The discussion was started by Mark and Gordon Selman, who argued in 2009 that contemporary adult education is no longer a social movement

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in any meaningful way, and we should get over that fact. The last two decades, they argue, have witnessed the demise of many established organisations at national and provincial levels, and a wider retreat from collective action across society as a whole, as well as an instrumentalisation of the training of adult education workers, and a fragmentation of the eld through the discourse of lifelong learning. The opposing case was put by Tom Nesbit and Budd Hall, both veteran adult educators. Hall and Nesbit note that: Levels of social action and protest are increasing, and adult educators continue as before to engage with and support a variety of such initiatives; they present the example of indigenous movements. University involvement in training adult educators has continued to promote debate over ideas, while new forms of university outreach have fostered innovative types of community engagement. The language of lifelong learning has done little to unsettle and interrupt the basic principles by which most adult educators design their work. Elsewhere, Tom Nesbit suggests that what has changed is the emergence of different forms of social movements with different forms of communication, which are typically looser and less structured groupings of the likeminded rather than xed organisations based on shared material interests, and dedicated to the continuing social necessity of creating an involved, informed and creative society for all. Hall and Nesbits defence of the traditional view of adult education as a social movement has my sympathy, at least in principle. But I do think that they underestimate the extent of change, both in the wider context of social movements, and in the relatively narrower world of education. Like many societies, Britain has witnessed a massication of higher education, and until the very recent past this has been partly fuelled by rising participation by adult students (particularly women), both full- and part-time. Higher education is now part of the normal life course for young people, and adult participation is equally the new norm in many institutions. We can see this development in higher education as part of a wider process by which lifelong learning has become part of the everyday experience of adult life. And this generalisation of lifelong learning is intersecting

with other forces to create and entrench divisions between the good learning citizen and the non-participant knowledge poor. I think it likely that the adoption of digital technologies through open educational resources and large scale open online learning will strengthen these trends. The rhetoric of open-ness ignores obvious inequalities in the creation of and control over knowledge and the provision of spaces and options for thinking about and acting on that knowledge. More broadly, recent economic and socio-cultural changes have severely eroded the spaces for public civic action. In so far as people do engage in civic action, it all too often represents a retreat into what Linden West has called the collective solipsism of fundamental identities, of the kind that we can see across Europe in the electoral success of populist nationalist parties.

Newer movements
On the other hand, Nesbit and Hall are clearly right to detect newer movements that represent looser coalitions of activists who represent a potential resource for adult learning. These newer movements often involve an active embrace of adult learning, often as a deliberate and conscious challenge to the dominant forms of knowledge distribution. In his report from Tent City University, Paul Stanistreet conveyed a sense of the wider attempt to redene and renew the idea of the public university. But the Tent City University, like the Occupy movement of which it was part, was fundamentally shortlived not merely ephemeral, but very much experienced and lived as of the moment. And it appears to have been a movement of the highly educated. While older understandings of adult education as social movement are no longer sustainable, then, it is possible to discern new and emerging practices of learning by social movement activists alongside a continuing fertilisation of adult education by social movement ideas. There are also important human goals to strive for in our society, though perhaps they will not be pursued by the type of organised mass movements that Tawney sought to engage with. Rather, there are newer movements to which those concerned with adult learning have a lot to offer, and which in turn have a lot to offer our eld. John Field is Professor of Lifelong Learning, University of Stirling. A version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of SCUTREA, in June, at Glasgow Caledonian University.

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