Community Education, Learning and Development

• Editorial: Dunedin Academic Press
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781906716455
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Education General

Lyn Tett has developed her discussion of community education to include aspects of learning and development in this revised and expanded third edition of her popular text. The book illustrates the conceptual and political debates surrounding the role, purpose and practice of community education, learning and development. Community Education, Learning and Development moves behind the policy rhetoric to recognise and explore some of the tensions in current policy trends, particularly the danger of seeing social marginalisation and exclusion as an individual problem rather than a result of structured inequalities. A number of community education, learning and development projects are examined to give a real sense of the approach being advocated and to make a case for a model of lifelong learning focusing on democratic renewal. The task of community educators and those concerned with learning and development is not an easy one. They must recognise competing interests but still enable voices that have been excluded to be heard, whilst also seeking ways of building mutual understandings and cooperation. The challenge for community education is considerable but this book provides a real sense of its possibilities for learning and development throughout life.

Chapter 1

Community Education: Antecedents and Meanings

Education for the labouring poor would be prejudicial to their morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life instead of making them good servants in agriculture and other laborious employments. (Hansard 1st series, ix, 1807: cols 798–9)

Introduction

Community education’s primary purpose is education within and for communities. This involves a blurring of traditional boundaries and an emphasis on education that grows out of people’s experiences and the social interests that are generated within communities. It has a different focus from mainstream education both in its curriculum and in its methods. Community education is about encouraging and engaging people throughout life into learning that is based on what they are interested in. Education is developed that is relevant to the participating learners and is responsive to community priorities identified with people rather than for them. The motivation and purpose for learning by the participants will change over time, but if education is rooted in communities ‘it will allow genuinely alternative and democratic agendas to emerge at the local level’ (Martin, 1996:140).

Although it is one of the newer forms of educational development, compared to formal educational institutions such as schools, the conceptual origins of community education stem from two much older traditions. These originated in the early nineteenth century when rapid economic growth and industrial development led to the first demands for social reforms (see Crowther, 1999; Shaw, 2003). One of these traditions came from the radical working class organisations that developed popular educational activities through existing networks of support and solidarity. This involved acting and educating against the status quo in order to develop ‘knowledge calculated to make you free’ (Johnson, 1988). The other tradition is derived from the philanthropic provision of education in communities for poor, working-class adults and young people, largely organised by Christian socialist bodies, in order to help alleviate ‘problems, strengthen character, encourage independence and preserve the family’ (Shaw, 2003:10).

Community education can be difficult to define as its focus varies over time in response to changing local, national and global educational priorities. So in trying to locate it both historically and contextually two issues have to be addressed. One is that ‘community’ is an ambivalent concept that is difficult to define but, as Raymond Williams noted, ‘never seems to be used unfavourably’ (1976: 66). The other is that community education activities include a very wide range of educational practices that come from different traditions with a range of purposes, meanings and intentions. These traditions are also influenced by the ways in which the nation state attempts to adapt educational policy and practice to changing ideologies and social and economic conditions. As the opening quotation of this chapter demonstrates, education for ‘the labouring poor’ has long been a source of contention and the different ideologies underpinning these disputes are brought into focus by the lens of community education.

In this chapter the antecedents of community education will first be explored and then attention will turn to discussing what is meant by the concept of ‘community’ and how its different interpretations are reflected in both formal definitions of education policy and the informal politics of local practice.

Antecedents of community education

Community education has grown out of organisations that have regarded their primary purpose as involving young people and adults in a range of activities. In this section the historical roots of those organisations that have emphasised educational work in communities are explored in order to identify both the underpinning ideas and the types of practice advocated. The focus will be on the extent to which the purposes of these organisations have identified local development, mutual support and social action as the key components of the education process.

Involving young people

Work directed at working-class young people first developed in the nineteenth century out of concerns about the deteriorating economic conditions that were impacting on those that had moved to the cities in search of employment. The squalid conditions in which poor young people were living were thought by the more affluent members of society to be affecting the potential for intellectual and emotional development of this group (Smith, 1988). The solution proposed was to give young people opportunities outside of these environments in order to improve their character and sense of responsibility (Smith, 1988). Youth work organisations began to develop and grow in the 1860s, particularly in London where the differences between rich and poor were most starkly contrasted and visible to the growing middle classes (Malone, 2002). George Williams founded the first organisation, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), in 1844 in London. Provision was underpinned by Christian Socialist principles and was dedicated to replacing young men’s life on the streets with prayer and Bible study (Smith, 1988). The YMCA was quickly followed by many other organisations that had similar intentions and the work was developed mainly by different Christian Churches.

The sponsors of youth work provision felt that the best way to attract young people was to provide facilities where they could enjoy themselves, but in return for this opportunity they would have to submit to being improved. As Mark Smith argued:

Sponsors of early clubs and youth provision recognised that if they were to safeguard the values and institutions that they believed in then young people would have to be socialised into seeing the world as they did. (Smith, 1988: 13)

This led to much youth work, particularly that targeted at boys, as having three main objectives: recreation, education, religion. Recreation was what attracted people into the clubs, education included physical, moral and mental training and religion comprised ‘all the impalpable influences which give a club a grip on its members and tend to awaken their higher nature’ (Russell and Rigby, 1908: 20). Work that focused on girls and young women placed more of an emphasis on relationships and gentle improvement so that girls might ‘ennoble the class to which they belong’ (Stanley, 1890: 48) and positively influence the men in their lives. Others argued, however, that the conditions in which girls worked also needed to be addressed and set out to improve these environmental issues through intervention in the public and private domains of girls’ lives (Spence, 1999). For example, Lily Montagu (1904: 250), who was one of the founders of the National Organisation of Girls Clubs, suggested that ‘if girls work for less than a living wage, in a vitiated atmosphere, they are not likely to become the strong, self controlled women whom we desire the clubs to train’.

Many of the distinctively bourgeois values on which youth work was based were dawn from the experience of their sponsors of public schooling and military service or represented ideal paradigms of middle-class leisure. The positive virtues derived from these experiences were contrasted with working-class culture that was seen as overly focused on the excitement that came from the theatres of the time and too self-centred and inward looking (Blanch, 1979). Youth work’s focus from this perspective was to direct working-class leisure into respectable channels, with either a religious or military bias or both. In addition, a number of youth work organisations, especially the uniformed groups such as the Boys’ Brigade, Scouts and Guides (founded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) had explicitly colonial and conservative values and aims where boys were ‘prepared for war or the workplace and girls to be housewives and mothers’ (St Croix, 2009: 304) and they required adherence to a strict set of rules.

There were also a number of more radical organisations such as the Woodcraft Folk (founded in 1925) that were set up with pacifist and socialist values, which, although they shared ‘the environmental values and many of the methods of Scouting [they] opposed its imperialist origins’ (St Croix, 2009: 304). More radical youth work was often developed by politically marginalised people, such as the pacifists during the Second World War, who were working with economically and socially disadvantaged young people and saw them as ‘creators not consumers’ (Smith, 1988: 46) of a more socially just society. Other organisations that were concerned with developing young people’s political understanding of power relations in society included the early Cooperative Youth Movement, the Young Socialists and the Socialist Sunday Schools. This latter movement began in the 1890s in Scotland and the aim was to teach socialist values to children so that ‘socialist beliefs continued from one generation to another’ (Fisher, 1999: 136). Later social movements such as the Women’s and Black Consciousness Movements developed in the 1970s. In all these cases more radical educational opportunities were seen as a way of helping young people to:

understand their experiences of oppression as being both personal and political [so] they can, as a consequence, take action in both the way they live their lives and in the political arena. (Smith, 1988: 56)

There were, and are, many traditions in youth work and these are but a small example designed to show how these early movements have impacted on community education today. It is also important to remember that, whatever the concerns of the organisers of provision, young people have the ability to disrupt their best efforts and take what they want out of it. This means that, as Mark Smith points out, ‘youth work cannot be portrayed as exhibiting a simple one-way imposition of middle-class values and behaviours upon the workingclass young’ (Smith, 1988: 20). It is in the interactions between the purposes of providers and those of the recipients that practice develops.

Involving adults

Just like youth work, the early development of education for adults came from competing traditions that had different ideological purposes. One tradition was derived from the radical working-class movements in the first half of the nineteenth century who used education to provide an understanding of their existing circumstances so that they could change them. Radical men and women of the time argued that ‘knowledge lies everywhere to hand for those who observe and think’ (Holyoake, 1896: 4) and saw education as about ‘the struggles of everyday life … and as a cooperative effort based on fellowship’ (Burke, 2009: 67). They argued that in order to preserve their independence ‘we must do it for ourselves’ and win what they regarded as real knowledge rather than the knowledge passed down from above (Johnson, 1988: 79).

In many ways the ‘radicals’ were reacting to what Ian Bryant describes as the ‘respectable’ tradition where education for the ‘moral improvement’ of the servant classes was advocated and supported by members of the affluent classes (Bryant, 1984: 5–7). One of the cultural roots of this tradition can be traced back to the influence of Calvinism and Presbyterianism where the ideals of thrift, discipline and self-improvement generated a culture that supported education as a means of acquiring spiritual salvation and material advancement (Crowther and Martin, 2006: 20). Another root of the respectable tradition was the demand for both a more skilled and also a more docile labour force as a result of the rapid industrialisation of manufacturing in the nineteenth century. This required people to be better educated and so some of the more enlightened employers took it upon themselves to educate their employees and their families who would in turn become employees. The pioneer for this work was Robert Owen in the New Lanark Mills who opened an ‘Institute for the Formation of Character’ in 1816. In his opening address Owen said that it was designed to change a number of existing practices including:

drunkenness, injustice in your transactions, want of charity for the opinions of others, and mistaken notions, in which you had been instructed, as to the superiority of your religious opinions, and that these were calculated to produce more happiness than any of the opinions impressed on the minds of an infinitely more numerous part of mankind. (Owen, 1816)

The Institute was therefore based on benevolent paternalism aimed at fitting the village youth for the world of work in the mills, saving the adults from the more radical forms of education offered by secular organisations and thus posing no threat to the existing order of society (Donnachie, 2003). Owen used a variety of methods to develop good character, including providing a basic education for the young children of New Lanark, evening classes for the adults and older children with dancing, music and military exercise ‘as one means of reforming vicious habits … by promoting cheerfulness and contentment, and thus diverting attention from things that are vile and degrading’ (Owen, quoted in Donnachie, 2003). His vision was that education would make good citizens of men and women through providing an environment in which their better natures would be encouraged to grow, with the body and mind both well cared for and trained in productive habits and ways of living (Cole, 1930). Again there are echoes of the concern that the providers of opportunities for young people had for ensuring that physical, cultural and intellectual stimulus was provided to help develop more bourgeois values.

The 1850s and 1860s were a period of relative prosperity and employers across the UK attempted to woo skilled workers by sponsoring libraries, educational lectures on science, history and culture, and social and musical activities. These activities were often linked with the Temperance movement as many employers shared Owen’s concerns about his employees’ drunkenness (Cooke, 2006) and so, by the 1860s, Temperance societies had been established by many of the large-scale manufacturers. One historian suggested that the Temperance movement had the ‘short term aim of increasing the usefulness of skilled workers … and the long term aim of spreading bourgeois values’ (Pollard, 1963: 268) but Anthony Cooke argues that ‘for many workers it was a grassroots movement, linked to economic survival and self respect’ (2006: 115). The outcomes of this and other social movements of the period were influenced by how much democratic control the workers had over the organisation.

The early part of the twentieth century saw the growth of both ‘respectable’ and ‘radical’ education under the influence of the labour and cooperative movement. For example, in the ‘respectable’ tradition the Glasgow Cooperative Society had, by 1910, a thriving lending library, reading rooms, choirs and a women’s guild that provided classes in dressmaking, fancy work and other ‘domestic virtues’ (Cooke, 2006: 129). However, many adults who were unskilled or were not involved in large-scale manufacturing remained untouched by any form of organised educational effort because the main providers ‘overestimated ordinary people’s educational background but underestimated their intelligence’ by delivering lectures that patronised their audience (Bryant, 1984: 9).

During this period socialist educators, such as John MacLean, led ‘radical’ education and this group gave evening classes in the Glasgow engineering shops and the Clydeside shipyards to workers’ study groups. The curriculum was framed by Marxist texts and the aim was to equip workers’ leaders intellectually to play their part in the anticipated revolution (Crowther and Martin, 2006: 20). MacLean contrasted this form of learning with education designed to ‘increase efficiency … to make better wage slaves or better producers of commodities’, whereas his aim was to ‘see that all public educational institutions are used for the creation of intelligent, class-conscious workers’ (quoted in Bryant, 1984: 10). The rival organisation, the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), established in Scotland in 1908, was regarded with distain by the socialists because it adopted a more personal enrichment ideology. However, it was also concerned with helping workers gain an awareness of social and political affairs and was geared towards providing an education for working people to become social and political leaders (Bryant, 1984:10).

In contrast, the respectable tradition in Scotland in the first half of the twentieth century was linked with the slow growth of university extra-mural provision—a patchwork of liberal adult education, leisure and interest-based courses provided mainly by the ancient Scottish universities—and local authority adult classes. The other important strand of adult provision (or, more accurately, training) was ‘night classes’ which offered certificated vocational courses, mainly in further education colleges. In statistical terms, more people were probably involved in this kind of vocational training than all other forms of adult education put together (Bryant, 1984: 14).

It is important, however, not to make a simple distinction between these traditions, because in reality the overlap between them has been reformulated and reconfigured over time. This is partly due to changing currents of social and political struggle where both traditions have had some influence on the provision made by local authorities and further and higher education in catering for marginalised communities. For example, the growth of new social movements from the 1970’s, especially the peace, women’s and environmental movements, ‘reinvigorated organisations like the WEA and refocused their social purpose’ much more on social change (Crowther and Martin, 2006: 20).

Working with poor communities

Work in poor communities has its roots in the early social reforms in health, housing, social work, local government and town planning carried out in the late nineteenth century in response to the growing discontent of the new urban poor (Yeo and Yeo, 1988). In a similar way to work with young people, early provision was carried out through philanthropic efforts with the most prominent body, the Charity Organisation Society (COS), being established in 1869 (Leat, 1975). A particular concern was the lack of self-reliance amongst the poor and the suggested solution was to strengthen character and encourage independence by working to change individuals rather than the circumstances they were experiencing. One of the founders of COS, Canon Samuel Barnett, went on to establish the University Settlement Movement that was designed to be:

the means by which men or women may share themselves with their neighbours; a club-house in an industrial district, where the condition of membership is the performance of a citizen’s duty; a house among the poor, where residents may make friends with the poor. (Barnett, 1898: 26)

Barnett’s vision was that these natural leaders would help to bring about social order in the densely populated urban areas in ways that would avoid the potential for dissidence. However, he did have a more structural view of the reason why people were not practising self-help than the members of COS because he viewed people’s social problems as a consequence of poverty rather than as caused by character defects (Shaw, 2003). Settlements aimed to convert ‘the crowded, squalid and featureless inner city into active and coherent neighbourhoods’ (Rose, 2001: 27) through the creation of a village within an urban slum as a return to the rural idyll. People from the more articulate and prosperous classes were expected to act as role models of civic leadership and ‘improve the character of the poor by example’ (Craig et al., 1982: 1). Three key areas for action were identified by the Settlements: for scientific research concerning poverty; the furthering of wider lives throug...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Community Education: Antecedents and Meanings
• Chapter 2: Community Education in Scotland
• Chapter 3: Lifelong Learning and Community Education
• Chapter 4: Learning, Knowledge and Development
• Chapter 5: Young People and Community Engagement
• Chapter 6: Community Education, Risk and the Education of Desire
• Chapter 7: Community Education, Democracy and Equality
• References
• Index
• Copyright
• Back Cover