Adult Education For a Change

Jane L. Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429773259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica per adulti

Originally published in 1980 this book examines why adult education historically failed to attract working class students and whether experiences in Northern Ireland, the USA and Italy have any lessons to teach. Drawing together authors committed to adult education, the essays give fresh theoretical perspectives and explore developments of the post-War period, asking if they are designed to remedy educational wrongs or help perpetuate them.

Part One
Perspectives

1 Adult education and the sociology of education: an exploration

Sallie Westwood, Lecturer in Adult Education, University of Leicester

This paper takes as its central problem the theorization of the middle-class bias of adult education as a means of exploring the relationship between adult education and the sociology of education. The middle-class domination of adult education has a long history and has remained a source of debate and discussion to the present time. The premise upon which this paper is based is that unless we have a clear understanding and analysis of this middle-class bias we cannot begin to reconstruct or radicalize adult education.

The social class bias of adult education was statistically described in the National Institute of Adult Education Survey which showed clearly that the middle class is over-represented in all forms of adult education provision. [1] In addition, the survey demonstrated that the provision was itself stratified. Thus, the universities draw 92 per cent of their students from the A, B, and CI categories and this representation of the A and औ groupings lessens in the local authority sector. The conclusions of the survey are summed up by Fordham et al. in their recent book.

We began with the fact that students in adult education classes are increasingly drawn from the higher socio-economic groups and from groups with a background of full-time secondary or higher education. [2]

The fact that adult education is consistently biased towards the middle class requires that we re-evaluate current views of the field. It is suggested that adult education is distinctive and that its difference is defined by the diversity of forms present in adult education and the voluntary nature of the participation. This view leads to comments such as those made by Houghton, where he writes, ‘At present in the post-industrial countries the adult education sector has a proliferation of courses and organizations which defy rational analysis.’ [3] The following analysis seeks to oppose such a view.

An alternative but equally persuasive account of adult education is offered by the free-market view. This view suggests that adult education is an educational free market in which the provider is the entrepreneur and the public the consumers. This is clearly a mystification of the real situation: no free market exists where educational opportunities are differentially distributed and where the reasons for these inequalities are located in the class structure. Similarly, neither the entrepreneur nor the consumer is ‘king’ because the state at a national and local level intervenes and controls the flow of educational products. [4] The problems with this market view are similar to those within the economic model from which it is taken. The market view posits individual choice as a determining factor rather than the social conditions of existence of these ‘choices’.

Neither of the above accounts or models of adult education offers the adult educator a basis for understanding the social-class bias of adult education; and here it is instructive to turn initially to the Alexander Report where it is stated that:

Adult education is part of the total educational system and is influenced by broadly the same factors as influence the rest of educational provision. In addition, the character of school education has a considerable influence on all post-school education as regards the foundations on which it has to build and gaps it may have to fill. [5]

The implications of this view are that any understanding of the nature and function of adult education must be set within the wider socioeconomic structure and the relationship between this structure and the educational system taken as a whole. This suggests that an appropriate starting point for a theorization of the middle-class bias of adult education is a sociological one. To this end the remainder of the paper will be concerned with a presentation of some earlier and recent contributions to the field of the sociology of education and how these may usefully be appropriated for an understanding of adult education. However, this is not an analogy which is always accepted by adult educators. As Lowe has pointed out:

Seeing themselves as belonging to a hard school of pragmatists, realists one might say, many senior administrators are wary if not contemptuous of theorizing and hostile towards the aims of sociologists and psychologists and what they regard as the hocus-pocus of questionnaires and inquiries. Indeed, educators of adults in general have not yet perceived the relevance of the social sciences to their own work. [6]

I would suggest, however, that there are three major areas in which the sociology of education can contribute to our analysis of adult education. The first of these is the emphasis within the subject upon making education intelligible in relation to the wider socio-economic structure; secondly, children become adults and it is very clear that an adult’s view of adult education is formulated in relation to his or her own school experiences; finally, all education must place itself in relation to cultural transmission. These areas of concern seem to suggest that the incorporation of adult education within the sociology of education is long overdue. Practitioners within the field already hold a variety of commonsense views which, I would argue, can be more easily codified in relation to a sociological understanding. Newman, for example, writing about one adult education centre notes the handicaps associated with the use of school buildings:

Using schools in the evenings does not always help. It requires faith on entering some adult education premises to believe that anything but a repetition of one’s worst school experiences could ever take place in such surroundings. [7]

The message from this is clear but the reasons need further explanation; it is not simply the physical location of adult education that deters. It is, most importantly, the social location; that is, the social relationships of school and schooling that remain as part of the common stock of knowledge when education is remembered. It is the sociology of education that has tried to make intelligible the social relations of schooling.

The early sociology of education, as exemplified in the famous reader Education, Economy and Society, was based upon the ‘technical function’ view of education. [8] The basic premises of this view were located in the rapid technological changes apparent in the advanced industrial countries. The changes brought about through technology, it was argued, required an increasingly skilled and educated workforce to cope with rapid changes in the labour market. Education was given the central role of providing the skilled labour power by which technology could be translated into greater material wealth. It was, therefore, an investment area (as distinct from an area of consumption) in the key factor in the production process, labour. Clearly, this view still has a wide currency and is expressed in many of the arguments for continuing and recurrent education. It was used by the Alexander Report and can be seen as an underlying rationale for the recent discussion document on continuing education presented by the Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education. [9] Adult education has clearly been impressed by its basic premises and they have been incorporated into a general perspective on education and social change. Adult education like school education is presented as an area of investment.

However, to return to the early sociology of education, upon examination it was found that in Britain at least, the educational system was not functioning in an efficient manner in processing an educated and mobile workforce. As Floud and Halsey noted:

The truth is that the schools and universities function badly as selectors and promoters of talent....

and further,

Schools and universities were not designed for the selection processes thrust upon them in a modern economy by the tightening bond of schooling and occupation, and hence social class, nor were they designed to act as agencies of social justice, distributing ‘life chances’ according to some meritocratic principle in face of the social claims of parents for their children. [10]

The evidence presented by the early work of Floud, Halsey and Martin emphasized the class bias of education in Britain. [11] Education could not promote talent or greater equality because it was itself stratified and unequal. But the mood of the time was optimistic and the demand for greater equality of opportunity for all children became the plank upon which a comprehensive educational system was based. The selection of children at eleven was considered not only divisive but economically unsound because it did not make the most efficient use of the nation’s resources.

Randall Collins examined the technical function view of education and with the use of Berg’s material was forced to conclude that education, and especially schools, had little impact upon technical skills. [12] Instead, he offered the view that: ‘The main activity of schools is to teach particular status cultures, both in and outside the classroom.’ [13] For Randall Collins schooling represented one aspect of the battle fought between status groups to control certain sections of the labour market. Status groups use academic qualifications as part of their struggle for control over certain occupations. Important to these struggles are the particular status cultures imparted within specific educational institutions. The analysis presented by Randall Collins anticipates later discussions on the hidden curriculum in schooling and the importance of the cultural components of education. However, by insisting upon a Weberian view of status groups rather than classes the analysis leads away from the crucial significance of the class structure. This failure is similar to that of the early sociologists of education; although they conceptualized the educational system they did not provide an adequate account of the framework within which it operates.

The analysis offered in the 1970s by the sociology of education, is in marked contrast to that of the 1960s and has its origins as much in the growing contradictions of capitalism as in academic disaffection from the dominant functionalist paradigm in sociology. The emphasis upon capitalism as defining the terrain of education, and thereby the struggles that take place within that terrain, is an important distinguishing feature of the more recent sociology of education. It begins with the understanding that capitalism is an economic system organized for the accumulation of profits which are concentrated in the hands of a few. Conflict and crises are inherent within such a system, but so too are the mechanisms by which the system is able to reproduce itself, both in a physical and in a social sense.

Capitalism must reproduce itself not simply in terms of the physical means of production, plant and equipment, but it must also reproduce that which is essential to the extraction of profit, labour power. At a physical level this is done through the wage system, but the ongoing nature of capitalism requires more than simple labour power; it requires an ordered labour force, one that is prepared to submit itself to the production process. Capitalism requires, therefore, a specific ideological climate which is located at the material level in education, the media, the trade unions and the institutions of the democratic process itself. All of these, but most especially education, have a vital role to play in the reproduction of capitalism.

These components of civil society become, for Althusser, Ideological State Apparatuses owing to the impact of the state on their formation. [14] The ISAs are essential to the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production because they reproduce for capital the existing social relations of production which encompass the class system and its antagonisms, and the sexual division of labour and its special place in the reproductive process.

The attention given to the process of social reproduction in the recent writings of Althusser, Bowles and Gintis and Bourdieu allows us to see more clearly the role of education in relation to capitalism. [15] It allows us to plot the fortunes not simply of classes, but of classes in relation to the sexual division of labour and in relation to the state. The early sociology of education ignored the role of the state in relation to the nature and form of educational provision and its processes. It could not do otherwise because it had not started from capitalism but from a view of industrial society which incorporated a pluralistic view of the distribution of power. Similarly, it ignored the sexism of British education, a product of the overriding concern with class inequality and, in addition, the sexism of sociology itself. Recently, Rosemary Deem and Ann-Marie Wölpe have made use of the work of Althusser and Bourdieu as a means of analysing the sexist biases of the educational system. [16] Their work has demonstrated how the sexual division of labour, with its inbuilt inequalities, contributes to the process of social reproduction in an essential way through the physical reproduction of labour pwoer and its servicing and repair in the home by women. Domesticity is important to the ongoing nature of the system as a whole. Schooling has a vital role to play in the reproduction of the sexual division of labour. Education imparts to children not, as we understand them, conventional subjects and skills, but as Althusser notes:

besides these techniques and knowledges ... children at school also learn the ‘rules’ of good behaviour, i.e. that attitude that should be observed by every agent in the division of labour, according to the job he is ‘destined’ for; rules of morality, civic and professional conscience, which actually means rules of respect for the socio-technical division of labour and ultimately the rules of the order established by class domination. [17]

Thus, for Althusser, schooling is ultimately a process that contributes not towards knowledge in a pure sense, nor personal development, nor liberation but towards a quiescent work force. This point is emphasized by Bowles and Gintis who, while ignoring the role of the state as the facilitator of this process, describe a system of correspondence similar to Althusser. Thus, Bowles and Gintis note:

The educational system serves — through the correspondence of its social relations with those of economic life — to reproduce economic inequality and to distort personal development. Thus under corporate capitalism, the objectives of liberal educational reform are contradictory: it is precisely because of its role as producer of an alienated and stratified labour force that the educational s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Adult Education Publications
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One. Perspectives
• Part Two. Selected studies
• Notes and Reference
• Index