Adult Education and Cultural Development

David Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429769665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

Originally published in 1988, this book examines the concept of culture and the transmission of cultural values in relations to adult education. It emphasizes the importance of perceiving culture as a social construct which is part of a specific value system and questions how cultural development is promoted or hindered by adult education. It also describes a number of case studies from popular courses such as painting and pottery.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

This book is about the arts in adult education. It is intended for those involved in adult education as either teachers, policy makers or theorists. It is not aimed at regular adult education students, though some of them may find it interesting and useful, but rather at the student of adult education. It aims to offer a means whereby practitioners can locate their work in relation to a theory of cultural development. It is argued that whenever people become involved in the arts in the context of adult education they can either preserve the dominant cultural value system or they can develop it. Development can take place when the participants in the educational activity are involved in creative or appreciative work. The preservation of cultural values can take place in a creative class just as much as in an appreciation class.

It is not suggested that one form of activity is of greater value than the other, indeed, it is argued that it is as important to engage with the arts of the past and the value systems they embody as it is to develop new art forms and new value systems. It is suggested, however, that current practice in developed countries is biased towards the preservation of a largely European cultural tradition and there may be a case for adult educators to redress this balance by becoming more involved in cultural development.

Before this can be done, however, it is necessary to have a means of identifying whether or not a given arts activity in adult education is concerned with cultural conservation or cultural development. In order to do this the book sets the arts in adult education in a wider cultural context and provides a means to analyse the value and conceptual systems which underpin that culture. It also offers a means whereby adult educators can identify the way in which their learning activity is oriented to the cultural context in which they are working; a means of deciding whether a particular approach to the arts in adult education preserves or develops the cultural tradition.

In writing this book it is my intention to relate theory to practice and I attempt, throughout, to make clear the practical implications of the theories under discussion. I try to avoid jargon but this is not always possible. It is especially difficult where the works of other writers are being discussed. However, it is hoped that I can avoid some of the worst excesses of language. Above all, I would like the book to be accessible to the reader who has a background in the arts or crafts but who does not have a specialist knowledge of those aspects of psychology, sociology and philosophy to which I refer.

The theoretical framework which informs much of the writing in the following chapters derives from critical theory, that philosophical tradition which had its origins in the work of the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer (1972 and 1974), Adorno (1941, 1967 and 1972), and Marcuse (1956 and 1964) were associated with the Institute of Social Research founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt. It was here that the ideas which we now refer to as critical theory were first developed. These theories have been further developed by Habermas (1970 and 1974) and, more recently and in the field of education, Gibson (1986). This last writer explains the essence of critical theory like this:

Critical theory argues that in human affairs all “facts” are socially constructed, humanly determined and interpreted, and hence subject to change through human means.

(Gibson 1986:4)

Gibson suggests that critical theory can be both enlightening and emancipatory by enabling individuals to become aware of the conflicting interests which shape their understanding and their lives. He suggests that critical theory sees ‘art as an inherently emancipatory activity, but one which is frequently used to serve other interests’ (1986:12). He goes on:

Critical theory, therefore, seeks to locate artistic work in its social context, to consider author and audience in the light of history, to seek the social shaping of criteria for aesthetic evaluation and to identify the social purposes and interests served …

… Not only are the arts important for the emancipatory images they provide for society, but their potential for individual liberation is great.

(Gibson 1986:12–13)

This view coincides with my own intention in writing this book. All my professional life as an adult educator I have endeavoured to make the arts more widely accessible and my writing here draws, to a large extent, on that professional experience. My own background is in the visual arts and my first qualifications in higher education were in the fields of pottery and painting. The experience from which I draw my illustrations and examples will reflect this initial education and there may be a bias towards the visual. I will try, however, to refer to all art forms and, indeed, to allow for the possibility of extending our concept of the arts to include activities which we currently do not consider to be arts. A critical approach will allow an examination of how a concept of the arts is socially determined.

In a similar way, critical theory allows a much broader view of education and learning than is often the case in writing on the subject. In reviewing the work of Bourdieu (1974, 1977a and 1977b) Gibson makes the following point:

Learning, for Bourdieu, thus becomes far more than merely a cognitive activity. As the process and outcome of cultural activity it is deeply embedded in all aspects of an individual’s being; mind, feeling, body.

(Gibson 1986:57)

Such a broad view of the nature of learning permits a discussion of those activities in the arts which are not cognitive but concerned with creative process and aesthetic response. Education is not seen as being solely about the acquisition of knowledge. It is seen, rather, as involving a realisation of a far broader conception of human potential. Engaging with the arts involves a range of skills and abilities which do not fit neatly into a narrow cognitive view of educational activity.

I do, though, acknowledge a debt to what Sanford (1987:xi) refers to as the new ‘discipline of cognitive science which is an interdisciplinary subject using insights from linguistics, philosophy, computing science and engineering, as well as from psychology’. In writing about the arts, particularly the non-literary arts, one becomes aware of the inadequacies of language and the way in which our thoughts on a given topic can become trapped in an inappropriate conceptual framework.

But our main point is that the metaphors people use set the tracks along which thoughts and beliefs will tend to run. Language restricts thoughts just as thoughts manifest in language.

(Sanford 1987:59)

I am only too aware that the analysis which I offer occasionally retreats into language which is rooted in much earlier conceptual systems. The references to Jungian psychology in the section on appreciation are an example. They seem curiously out of date in the context of late 20th century Britain. My guiding principle has been a pragmatic one. If a particular system of metaphors offers an explanation for events or experiences which seems to me, the writer, to be appropriate, then I have valued it as worthy of consideration. All that I can offer is what I feel is the best explanation to date of the topics under discussion.

The social and political context within which these discussions take place is one where the value of the arts in society is increasingly being questioned. Debates about the content of school curricula are taking an increasingly utilitarian turn. Subjects are evaluated according to their usefulness in what is perceived as a predominantly scientific age. It appears that the practices and the values of the arts are not currently congruent with the direction in which society is thought to be moving. There are many explanations for this and all of them are complex. Williams offers the following list of what he terms socially based factors:

… (i) the crisis, for many artists, of the transition from patronage to the market; (ii) the crisis, in certain arts, of the transition from handwork to machine production; (iii) crises within both patronage and the market, in a period of intense and general social conflict; (iv) the attachment of certain groups to a pre-capitalist and/or pre-democratic social order, in which some arts had been accorded privilege within a general privilege; (v) the attachment of other groups to the democratisation of the social order, as part of the process of general liberation and human enrichment to which the arts, if they were allowed, could contribute; (vi) a more general opposition, often overlapping and even seeming to unite these diverse political views, to the practices and values of a ‘commercial’ and ‘mechanical’ civilisation, from which the practice and values of the arts could be distinguished.

(Williams 1986:72)

It is within this context that the role of adult education in relation to the arts is examined. The values which are both implicit and explicit in educational and in artistic activity are analysed so that those involved in adult education can better understand the contribution they are making to the cultural environment in which they work.

It is hoped that this book makes a contribution to the theory of adult education. The evidence which is brought to bear on the arguments which I develop comes from a wide range of sources; there are references to material from psychology and sociology as well as to the work of educationalists and philosophers, artists and critics. My assumption is that individual readers, in approaching this book, will pick their way to the sections which are of most immediate interest to them. Readers who may not wish to become involved in a philosophical discussion of the nature of culture can turn straight to the section on adult education which is of a more practical nature. In order to facilitate this I offer a brief guide to the structure of the book.

Following this introductory chapter the book begins with a discussion around the concept of culture. According to Gibson (1986:9) ‘four major aspects of culture have significance for critical theory’. He identifies these as ‘High culture, popular culture, youth culture and culture and nature’. This formulation is too restrictive for my purposes. The critical theory philosophers, who were members of the educated elite of Frankfurt society, related to a concept of high culture which was born of their experience. But this is not the experience of the majority of people. Consequently, I have attempted to develop an alternative formulation and in Chapter 2 offer a typology of culture which may better serve both my purposes and the needs of adult educators. The central thesis of Chapter 2 is that a culture is better thought of as being quite modest in size. It is difficult to identify the major characteristics of a macro-culture, say European or Western culture, but the concept becomes manageable if we think in terms of micro-cultures, say, the working class youth culture of Birmingham in the 1960s. It is at this level that adult educators can identify the cultural context in which they work and begin to have an impact upon it.

Chapter 3 is concerned with the arts. In an attempt to clarify and understand what is meant by the term ‘arts’, the different ways in which the term is used are analysed. The ways in which we distinguish the arts from other human activities are discussed in order to demonstrate that our concept of the arts is a social construct. This resort to linguistic analysis serves to show that our concept of the arts is relative; what is included in a concept of the arts depends on the cultural context in which the term is being used. I do not want to propose that the different views of the nature of the arts should be valued in a hierarchical sense, one conception being superior to another. The suggestion is that equal weight is afforded to the many differing views of the arts and that they should be seen in their cultural and historical context. The historical record supports this view of what Lawson refers to as a ‘normative relativism’ in relation to the arts and to values in the arts. He discusses three sorts of relativism which he terms ‘descriptive’, ‘methodological’ and ‘normative’. Of the latter he says:

A normative relativism can then be introduced which claims that because there are examples of people who do make different value judgements, and because there are no criteria for testing their various points of view, then what is thought to be right or good for one person or group is right or good for them, but is not right or good for some other group. Put slightly differently, the actual differences between people on matters relating to values ought to exist.

(Lawson 1982:13)

It is, then, not only the concept of the arts which is shown to be relative but also the value systems which such concepts embrace. Chapter 3 demonstrates that values in the arts are not constant, that even within a given cultural context values can change over time. The chapter identifies three different ways in which the arts are valued and demonstrates that they are all relative. The arts and any notion of what constitutes ‘good art’ are both shown to be social constructs.

Chapter 4 is perhaps the most important to the educational theme of the book. It is about the different ways in which we engage with the arts as either appreciators, creators, or participants. Each mode of engaging is analysed in order to identify what skills or abilities are involved and what difficulties or constraints might operate to the disadvantage of an adult student. The appropriate mode of attending to the task in hand, be it appreciation, creation or participation, and the appropriate form of consciousness for each mode of engaging with the arts is identified and analysed.

It is proposed that there is a need for high levels of perceptual acuity for involvement in artistic activity and the nature of perception is discussed in relation to the arts. There is a great deal of evidence from psychology to demonstrate that perception is culturally determined and this evidence is reviewed and the implications for the arts in adult education are outlined. The nature of the creative process is analysed so that those involved in adult education can better understand the nature of the educational undertaking.

In order to provide a framework for the discussions in Chapter 4, I acknowledge the concept of the arts which is currently accepted. What is included in this concept of the arts is described in the chapter. Much of what is said, however, will be applicable to other forms of creative activity which we currently do not associate with the arts. It should ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Culture
• 3. The Arts
• 4. Engaging with the Arts
• 5. Access to the Arts
• 6. Adult Education and Cultural Development
• Bibliography
• Index