Education for Adults

Volume 1 Adult Learning and Education

Malcolm Tight

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136628429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The nature of adult education at individual, group and community levels is the concern of this book. Definitions and patterns of adult learning are critically assessed in both this country and abroad, and the processes involved considered in detail. Both case studies and thematic articles have been included and are selected to illustrate the breadth of the field along a number of areas: formal, non-formal and informal education; face-to-face and distance education; from basic levels of education to higher education; from highly deterministic to more 'open' or self-directed forms of education. It is felt that the study and practice of the education of adults can be best advanced by the adoption of such a broad view.

Part 1

DEFINITIONS AND PATTERNS

The three chapters included in this part of the Reader examine the varied traditions, definitions and patterns of education for adults to be found in the Western World, in the Soviet Bloc and in the Third World.

Brian Groombridge, in the opening chapter, takes the bull by the horns in addressing the underlying problems of definition. He points out the different usages of the term ‘adult education’ in Britain and other parts of the Western World, and puts forward a broader view of education for adults, categorising different kinds of provision and education along a three-fold axis between prescriptive (e.g. traditional schooling), personal or popular (individual or group control of the educational process) and partnership (where teachers and learners meet on an equal and cooperative basis) modes of study. This simple but useful classification may be borne in mind when considering other chapters in this Reader and elsewhere, when terms like ‘adult education’ and ‘education of adults’ are often used almost synonymously.

The humanity that is apparent in the chapter by Groombridge, and the current marginal status of adults in the British educational system despite the long history of provision made for them, contrasts sharply with the position in Eastern Europe described by Jindra Kulich. The history of educational provision for adults in these countries is brief, yet it is currently of great importance and is carefully controlled and used by the state. The development of the study of adult education is also well advanced, though sometimes on narrowly focused lines, with much of the material that has been produced difficult to access in the Western World.

Lalage Bown’s chapter on Third World patterns provides a further contrast. Here again the history of education for adults is relatively short, but the potential for development is great and is in part being realised, whilst the impact of Third World thinking and practice on the West is already apparent (see, for example, the chapters by Allman and Mezirow in this Reader).

1.1

ADULT EDUCATION AND THE EDUCATION OF ADULTS

Brian Groombridge

Source: Copyright ©The Open University 1983 (specially written for this volume).

The literature of adult education abounds in attempts to define it. One of the most succinct definitions is that pared down over a period of years by Edward Hutchinson, founder-director of the National Institute of Adult Education (England and Wales):

Adult education is … all responsibly organised opportunities … to enable men and women to enlarge and interpret their own living experience.¹

All such definitions are problematic, of course, and this terse attempt is no exception. The word ‘responsibility’ might seem now to have too institutional a connotation; and not everyone will respond to the subtle harmonics of ‘living experience’, as distinct from mere ‘experience’.

Cyril O. Houle’s definition is almost as economical. In this essay I shall not try to do better (although I might have substituted the more inclusive word ‘change’ for ‘improve’):

Adult education is the process by which men and women (alone, in groups, or in institutional settings) seek to improve themselves or their society by increasing their skill, knowledge or sensitiveness; or it is any process by which individuals, groups, or institutions try to help men and women improve in these ways.²

In this definition, the adult education process is not necessarily ‘provided’. As Robert A. Carlson points out, in a combative chapter at the end of the American handbook Redefining the Discipline of Adult Education:

Certainly some adult education is carried out by agencies and by educational arms of existing institutions. But even more of it is carried out … by … peers, poets, propagandists, priests, peddlers, politicians, performers, publishers, pamphleteers, playwrights, publicans, and practitioners of the plastic arts.³

When undertaking to define adult education, writers are at least trying to hold the words steady so that their meaning may be clearly discerned, but when they are just being used the student of adult education will find that the words ‘adult education’ are often unstable. They have changed their meanings over time: they may even change their meaning within the span of a single text. Thinking systematically about adult education can be like trying to build with wet soap.

Some definitions or usages of ‘adult education’ are too broad. Writers who are properly anxious not to equate adult education with a narrow range of designated agencies sometimes go too far and seem to make education synonymous with all learning. The key words in Houle’s definition are ‘seek’ (in ‘seek to improve’) and ‘try’ (in ‘try to help’). Education is present when there is an intention, not necessarily to teach, but at least to accomplish or facilitate learning. Defending themselves against Carlson, Boyd and Apps, the editors of the handbook already quoted, insist that the term: ‘… unorganised education is, for us, a paradox’.⁴

On the question of who organises, however, their view is close to Carlson’s. For them:

Education is a plan for learning, and activities that are planned are not unorganised. Institutions and agencies, however, do not have a monopoly on organising learning activities. Any agency, institution, individual, group or community can organise adult education activities. Churches, museums, service clubs, groups of neighbours, party lovers and noontime joggers have the potential to provide adult education. It does not matter if a group is commonly thought of as an institution of adult education; nor does it matter if any of the participants are designated adult educators by training or experience. The criterion … is whether the individual or group has developed a plan for learning.⁵

There is a grey area of importance. We are all ‘educated’, to a greater or lesser extent, by legislation, by publicity, by images in the mass media, and by other environmental forces, where there is not necessarily a ‘plan for learning’ as such, but where there is a socially diffused, semi-structured, more or less deliberate intention to shape attitudes and mould consciousness. The distinctions between ‘educational’ and ‘educative’, or between ‘intended to educate’ and ‘tending to educate’ are useful in differentiating phases in a continuum.

By contrast, some definitions or usages of ‘adult education’ are too narrow. Between the 1920s and 1950s, for example, it was common to identify ‘adult education’ with movements promoting liberal education for social reform, usually employing some characteristic teaching method, and thereby to equate it, in Britain, with the long courses of the Workers’ Educational Association in tandem with University extra-mural departments; in Denmark, with the residential Folk High Schools; in Sweden, with Study Circles; and in the United States with community action and development. The British literature of the period constantly refers to ‘the adult education movement’, but a decade later practitioners began to debate whether it was a movement or a service. The dilemma arose in part from a modest but definite increase in the scale and quality of commitment by the local authorities.

Although the 1944 Education Act is dedicated to the education of the people (and not just the children) of England and Wales, the term ‘adult education’ does not appear in it. Legally speaking, ‘adult education’ is a relatively unprotected species of the genus ‘Further Education’ (which is named in the Act). By convention, it has come in England and Wales to mean the associated activities not just of the WEA and the Universities but, above all, the general, personal, cultural, recreative classes (so-called ‘non-vocational’ classes) run by local education authorities. This was the meaning of ‘adult education’ in the slogan, heard increasingly in the late 1970s, ‘Save Adult Education’. At that time considerably increased sums of money, including state and public money, were in fact being spent on educational opportunities for adults through new forms of industrial training and through extensions to educational broadcasting (including programmes in liberal and cultural subjects). A distinction was being made, more or less overtly, and undoubtedly of great significance to the campaigners, between ‘adult education’ and the education of adults. (Other countries and other languages have been affected by the same uncertainties, with, for example, the distinction in French between l’apprentissage des adultes, éducation des adultes, and l’éducation populaire, alongside the broader concept of éducation permanente (lifelong education), which in turn seems often to be reduced in practice to formation continue.)

Categories

An internationally accepted distinction between Formal, Non-formal and Informal Education helps to make the domain comprehensible. Even these categories are not used uniformly or consistently, but broadly speaking:

1. Formal education is that provided by the education and training system set up or sponsored by the state for those express purposes;

2. Non-formal education comprises the many deliberate educational enterprises set up outside the education system, e.g. by other ministries or departments (health, agriculture and others), or by agencies with primary objectives to which education is subordinate (churches, trades unions and others);

3. Informal education (which undoubtedly slides into unplanned, incidental learning) is that vast area of social transactions in which people are deliberately informing, persuading, telling, influencing, advising and instructing each other; and deliberately seeking out information, advice, instruction, wisdom and enlightenment.

These categories have their uses. When confronted by a text or slogan about adult education, it may be relevant to check whether Formal, Non-formal or Informal is meant. Adult education may be part of the education system; or it may be an activity or process promoted by a non-educational body; or it may be a relatively spontaneous feature of social life. Recognising that adult education may be part of the education system underlies the more specific recognition that some forms of it are remedial and others are not. Although not so designated, some adult education is in effect adult primary education, adult secondary education, and so forth. Much education for adults in, for example, the Netherlands (the so-called ‘Mother-school’ for instance) and in Eastern Europe is in this form. There is a strong belief in Britain, however, reflected in the stress on maturity in E.M. Hutchinson’s definition, that many kinds of adult education are by no means remedial, for which being a developing adult, having adult experience and responsibilities, is the essence of the matter.

Implications for Policy

The debate about resources for adult education has been in large part a debate about whether such adult education should be regarded as an integral part of the post-school sector of the Formal system. In Britain, there is a tendency sharply to distinguish the education of adults from the schooling of children, an antithesis which makes for pedagogical strengths in adult education but for its political weakness; in several European countries, by contrast, there is a tendency to treat adult education as remedial schooling for grown-ups.

These more-than-semantic matters have left their impression on the process of policy formation in Britain. They showed, for example, in the terms of reference and conclusions of two major committees of enquiry in the 1970s — the Russell Committee in England and Wales⁶ and the Alexander Committee in Scotland.⁷ Despite their positive and sometimes eloquent assertion of the value of personal, social and general education for adults (so that ‘adult education’ turned into ‘community education’ in Scotland and it became harder everywhere to use the feeble negative ‘non-vocational’), both reports were weakened, conceptually and in their impact on politics, through the emasculating absence of any direct concern with education for economic well-being, technological adaptability and industrial productivity — matters as important to individuals (the good job as a passport to the good life and even as part of it) as to societies (needing to create wealth as well as dispose of it).

The Russell Report had some effect. It provided a rationale and created a climate for the adult literacy campaign and other cheap but worthwhile extensions of adult primary education. It helped the WEA find a new relevance and extra-mural departments to become of more interest and value to their parent universities. It correctly anticipated that the success of the Open University would lead to the creation of what Russell called ‘analogues’ (open and distance learning systems) operating at other academic levels and in non-academic fields. It also recommended that policy and practice would be improved by the creation of a national development council for adult education. What actually happened was better and worse: worse in that an advisory council was set up (in 1977), poorly financed and with no assurance of a long life; better in that it was called the ‘Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education’ (ACACE). The phrase ‘adult and continuing education’ was widely thought at the time to be a mere politically acute euphemism. In the event, the term ‘continuing’ became the more important, but without the liberal, reformist values connoted by ‘Adult Education’ being extinguished. ACACE’s major report, avowedly a policy guide meant to last 20 years, was called Continuing Education: From Policies to Practice.⁸

In his Chairman’s Preface to the report, Richard Hoggart is inevitably preoccupied with meanings. He clearly distinguishes ‘adult education’ and ‘continuing education’, construing the former mainly as a specialised service sector and the latter as a comprehensive system. ‘Adult Education’, which the report qualifies as ‘adult general education’ comprises ‘all the varied opportunities offered to adults by local education authorities, university extr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• General Introduction
• Part One: Definitions and Patterns
• Part Two: Processes
• Part Three: Individual Learning
• Part Four: Group Learning
• Part Five Community Learning
• Index