The following text is taken from a lecture given by Alan Tuckett, Director of NIACE, at the University of East London on Wednesday 24 January 2001.

Harbans Bhola, the distinguished Indian adult educator, makes a useful distinction between the kind of adult learning associated with mass movements and social transformation on the one hand, and that where individual learners are concerned with securing and improving a place in the existing order of things on the other. He writes:

"We must recognise that adult education in all societies of the world, whether developed or developing, is first a culture, and then a sector. Within the adult education culture, adults educate other adults, by beating drums for attention, singing folk songs, and shouting messages over loudspeakers, by putting posters on walls, and organising exhibits; by organising political and religious functions on street corners or in city parks; and by spreading the message over the radio and television. On the other hand, the adult education sector is made up of the adult education establishment comprising governmental and non-governmental institutions; ministries, enterprises, research bureaux, night schools, and adult learning centres." (Bhola,1997, p47).

Adult education as culture is outside the walls, adult education as sector is inside them. For much of the last two decades in Britain, the overwhelming focus of attention has been inside the walls. Public policy debate has offered a pretty bleak view of the purposes and benefits of adult learning. A succession of governments focused on the needs of the labour market for a supply of flexible, skilled labour, and too often ignored any passion for learning or mild curiosity that resisted codification, accreditation, or other measures that provided external benchmarks. The complexity of funding mechanisms, at least in further education, took away many of the best minds from teaching and learning and engaged them in harvesting funding units. A parallel process in higher education saw extra-mural programmes dragooned by funding streams into a concentration on credit-bearing courses. Clearly there have been winners in this exercise, as can be seen from the decline in the number and proportion of people in the workforce who possess no qualifications (Figure 1), and from the steady rise in participation of those who enjoyed an extended initial education.

Text version of Figure 1

But there have been losers, too. The overall participation pattern showed that it did not pay to be old or poor, if you wanted to learn for its own sake, and this despite targeted fee waivers, and a growing recognition that something needed to be done about what the CBI called ‘the long tail of under-achievement’.

The 1992 Further and Higher Education Act was, perhaps, the high-water mark of the drive towards utilitarianism in education policy – certainly as far as it impacted on adult learners. Spurred on by arguments developed by Sheila Lawlor, who argued that all local education authority spending on adult education was theft of resources which ought to be spent on schools, the then Government prepared a White Paper whose early drafts suggested a ban on funding uncertificated adult education, except between consenting adults in areas of extreme disadvantage, when funding should be covered by social services budgets.

A vigorous campaign, in which the serried ranks of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes played a leading role, led to the muting of this proposal, and we were left, after the Act, with a divide between approved, publicly-funded education leading to qualifications and hole-in-the-corner uncertificated provision, funded from the scraps of increasingly beleaguered local authority budgets. Despite this, many local authorities succeeded in maintaining services at earlier levels. To get a well-rounded offer depended more and more on where you lived. It was, too, no surprise when, through the 1990s, tutors helped the government by turning poorly funded uncertificated work into accredited, and therefore better financed "Schedule 2" provision. That migration was bought at a high price. Between 1991 and 1994 NIACE mapped a 40 per cent fall in older learners’ participation. Few learners in their eighties are attracted by the romance of an NVQ3.

On the other hand governments throughout the industrial world were reacting to changes in technology that collapsed the boundaries of established industrial disciplines; to the decline of unskilled work, and the growth of knowledge-rich work. Given tight budgets for public investment (and in the UK this was the era of Mrs. Thatcher and the belief in the flawless efficiency of markets), there was an understandable desire to give priority to spending on areas which seemed likely to make the maximum impact on labour market performance.

Those views persisted in the Labour Government’s 1998 Green Paper, The Learning Age, at least if you skipped the Secretary of State’s short preface, and are there in the Treasury’s approach to investment in learning to this day, despite increasing evidence that the economy needs broadly-based knowledge and intelligently applied soft ‘skills’. NIACE’s research shows that you cannot tell the purposes of learners simply from the title of their courses, and that provoking a love of learning anything is a cost-efficient investment.

It would, though, be a mistake to pass over David Blunkett’s preface. It offered a vision of lifelong learning that sought to embrace learning as culture as well as learning as system. It was generous and inclusive. In it he argued:

"As well as securing our economic future, learning has a wider contribution. It helps make ours a civilised society, develops the spiritual side of our lives and promotes active citizenship. Learning enables people to play a full part in their community. It strengthens the family, the neighbourhood and consequently the nation."

He celebrates the curiosity to learn languages, to appreciate music, to enjoy the arts. If it is difficult to see where the paper that follows picks up on that holistic vision, there has been a steady increase in the focus on learning for capacity-building, and a recognition at least that the first steps on the learning ladder may well be learning for fun. Later in the preface, he returns to the issue of communities learning together:

"We are fortunate in this country to have a great tradition of learning. We have inherited the legacy of the great self-help movements of the Victorian industrial communities. Men and women, frequently living in desperate poverty, were determined to improve themselves and their families. They did so through the creation of libraries, study at workers’ institutes, through the pioneering efforts of the early trade unions, at evening classes, through public lectures and by correspondence courses. Learning enriched their lives and they, in turn, enriched the whole of society."

Across the life of this government, inspired by Blunkett, there has been a number of measures to widen the base of participation, and to encourage initiatives in otherwise excluded communities. The Adult and Community Learning Fund, the union learning fund, pathfinder initiatives in community capacity building – all sought to change the profile of participation. But the overall thrust of the education system remains targeted on labour market entry for young people. At the end of two years hard debate on the importance of community learning, the Learning and Skills Act offered just this to adult learners: ‘The (Learning and Skills) Council must secure the provision of reasonable facilities’ for post-19 education. And what is reasonable? ‘Facilities are reasonable if… the facilities are of such a quantity and quality that the Council can reasonably be expected to secure their provision.’ With so little on the face of the legislation, we continue to be reliant on the will and commitment of the Secretary of State.

I want, in this talk, to suggest that in part we only have ourselves to blame for this state of affairs. How is it, with a Secretary of State with an unparalleled sense of the dignity and liberation that learning can bring, have we made so little progress in recovering space for what I think of as seriously useless learning – by which I mean serious, engaging but with no immediate use value? In part, I think, it is because the terms of the debate about learning are set too firmly within the confines of what can be measured, weighed, marked. To counter that, we need to revive the debate about what it means to be educated. Certainly we need an educated workforce, and an active participative democracy. But will we achieve that by focusing exclusively on supporting individuals to gain a lengthening list of individual skills acquired?

To that end, it seems to me, we need to tell stories about learning – of triumph and disaster, of pleasure and pain, and above all stories that capture the cadences of learners themselves. Stories have their own logic, complexity, ambiguity. They are seldom reducible to a clear set of pre-ordained outcomes. But they can teach, and inspire, and encourage emulation. And at their best, they are fun.

Mind you, I have got into trouble doing this before. In 1993, during a short sabbatical, Warwick University invited me to be a visiting professor. In return, I agreed to give a public lecture. I spoke about social policy and adult learning, focusing on the tactical and strategic struggles around the 1992 legislation. It was not, in truth a very tidy talk – more like work in progress. As we left the lecture theatre, I overheard the distinguished academic in front of me commenting to his companion, ‘Any bugger can tell a good story.’ I was crestfallen. It was months before it occurred to me that this might be read as a compliment, since good stories linger in the mind. Anyway, it has been a long time since I have taken the risk again in so formal a setting. This time, though, I am doubly protected. First, story telling about adult learning as culture is what I want to talk about, as I said.

Second, I know no-one more interested in exploring the boundaries of our formal discourses than Nod Miller, who invited me here tonight. Her thesis played artfully on the cusp of autobiography and learning journey. Her work with the University of Manchester Broadcasting Consortium involved senior policy makers and programmers entering elaborate role-plays, working to rules established by Nod, to step outside their everyday experience and play, to learn (Miller and Norris, 1989). And the last time I visited this exhilarating campus she was at it again – constructing conscious rules of engagement for a group of academics at a seminar, to make us all think afresh.

I learned a lot about writing and register from Dave Ives, a literacy student at the Friends Centre in Brighton, where I worked during the 1970s. Dave, who has a moderate learning difficulty, made only limited progress as an independent reader in the time I knew him. But he took to writing with ease and passion – dictating drafts, editing them, settling for the view that some sentences said exactly what you wanted to say; some were not quite right, but given deadlines would have to do. Others in the final text were, in his view, weak, but he just could not find the words. Until then, schooled in textual criticism, it had somehow never occurred to me that all books were like that. I had conceived of writing as something whole. It was a liberating discovery.

Here is his piece, False Teeth, line broken for ease of reading – not exactly a poem, but writing with a sharpness and distinctiveness of cadence:

False Teeth

"Me and my mate was fishing at Newhaven
Out on a boat
And we had two blokes down from London
Out in the boat with us.

As George put his line out over the side
His false teeth fell out into the water
And went right down.

He had a lot of choice words
And then slumped against the side
And went to sleep.
The other bloke then said,
"Come on we’ll have some fun then",
And took his teeth out.
He tied them on the end of the line
And let it back down again.

He woke the other old boy up and said
"You’ve got a bite."
When he pulled the line up
He saw the false teeth.
He put them in his mouth and said
"They’re not my buggers!"
And then threw them over into the drink.

Some choice language went on in that boat."

Dave Ives was one of many new readers whose experience as adult literacy learners was of learning to read through learning to write. In part because adult literacy work in the 1970s was marginal; because there were few materials around, and because there was a shared will between learners and teachers to forge a curriculum meaningful to adults, a rich vein of working class writing appeared in Brighton, Bristol and Hackney; in Manchester and Camberwell. It was fostered through the paper, Write First Time. It connected to worker-writer publishing projects, was sold door-to-door in a manner reminiscent of the seventeenth century pamphleteers, and generated better sales than most published first novels. Alongside the writing, the adult literacy campaign, which grew from voluntary agencies in the social care sector, sought to reshape the power relations between tutors and students.

The dynamism of student writing was diminished when public funding for Write First Time ended in the changed climate of the early 1980s. The shift to competence and skills was accompanied by a silencing of strong voices, to such an extent that Claus Moser’s A Fresh Start report only describes literacy work as compensatory education. A student of Paolo Freire’s, in Recife, Brazil famously argued, "I want to learn to read and write to stop being the shadow of other people", and somehow Wordpower and Numberpower don’t stretch to meet that aspiration. At its best, though, literacy education begins that process from day one.

It is not, though, neutral work. My experience at the Friends Centre was that trusting students to set the agenda of what was read led quickly to accusations of political bias. The local MP went on television to denounce our work with people with ‘vulnerable minds’. The news showed a worksheet " suppress, oppress, depress" – dangerous phonics. There were stories of workers in dispute with bosses, a local press story (‘Thousands Mass to Mourn Mao’) and key words for a debate about squatting, a live issue in Brighton at the time. One student, Roger Weedon, responded, "I’m not reading Andy Pandy, that’s a racing certainty." Three government department enquiries later, the materials were deemed not to be biased, and were published as the best of available practice.

My experience in Brighton threw up two other examples of adult education as culture – the one inward-looking, the other a public celebration. The first illustrates the importance of borrowing ideas and adapting them. Titus Alexander had created a student free library at the University of Sussex, and we were keen to see if one might be established at the Friends Centre. In the scruffy cyclostyled news-sheet circulated to all the Centre’s students we asked people if they would loan or give books they had enjoyed reading, and wanted others to read. Ideally they would be paperbacks, since there would be no security in the operation of the library. It would rely on trust.

All we asked was that they were books that had been enjoyed. Within a week 7,000 volumes had been donated or loaned. There were, I remember 12 copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and a full set of Pelicans, donated by the retired Town Clerk of Stafford. The local MP, by now a friend of the Centre, gave some copies of Hansard. At a stroke you could see that the shared enthusiasms of the student body could amass a collection rich in social enquiry, literary curiosity, and above all range, beyond the scope of any of our individual collections or, in some areas anyway, that of the local public library. The collection is still there, though not so up-to-date as it was. I told this story recently to colleagues at NIACE, where I work, and now we have our own version starting in the Institute staff room – but with a new spin. Users are asked for 20p for each book borrowed to support local initiatives. The key to the library of enthusiasms was that it invented a new form for us to give expression to our sense of shared community. For that it was precious.

So was the Friends Centre Teach-In. In 1981, as a precursor to the philistinism of the 1990s, David Green, then leader of the Council in East Sussex announced that all funding for adult education was to be cut, explaining that ‘people don’t want to pay for tap-dancing on the rates.’ After the usual posters, demonstrations, letters to the paper, it seemed to me that the best way to make the case for the continuation of learning opportunities was to show how much they mattered to people. I had been a student in the 1960s, and remembered the cultural power of student sit-ins, which far outweighed their political impact. Transposing the sit-in to a Quaker meeting house and adult education centre was not a huge leap.

We asked all the people who had had contact with the Centre to offer one talk or workshop, free, on something that mattered to them, and that they could make accessible to the general public. We asked students to pay whatever they wanted to pay for classes. We asked the general public to sponsor the Teach-In as long as someone was studying (we said learning, perhaps optimistically), and we ran the event continuously from 9 o’clock on Monday morning until 9 o’clock on Saturday night.

Pensioners agreed to paint the night away, since they did not have to get up in the morning, and night presents different aesthetic challenges for painters. Astronomers worked in the garden every night. There was an all-night course on women in detective fiction, led by Jane Root, now Controller of BBC2. I taught an all-night history of rock music, which got stuck in theological discussions on the significance of Led Zeppelin. Eighty people came, and stayed. There was a peace conference, and a Messiah sing in. There were workshops in Victorian children’s theatre, safe live experiments with animals; laser technology; early morning seminars, at 6am on Sartre, and late night lectures on housing in Cuba. The weakest point in the week came when just two people sat through a history of the telephone early on Thursday, when the night shift had gone, and before the day’s new participants arrived.

Little that is newsworthy happens in the middle of the night, so the radio and television news programmes followed the event regularly. We were on Radio 4’s Today programme two or three times each day. A family, hearing about the Teach-In on the radio at home in the Orkneys, decided to spend a week’s holiday joining in. They arrived in their Volkswagen mobile home on Tuesday, and stayed. Literacy students compiled a daily paper of the event. Students volunteered to clean, cook, and service the building. By the end of the week, Mr. Green capitulated, explaining, ‘I was badly advised.’ For months everything the Centre offered was over-subscribed. But the most exciting thing about the event was the sense of agency engendered in the people who took part. Social invention and solidarity of that sort leaks from one context to another. It really does seem possible that, as David Blunkett suggests, we can learn our way out of our problems.

The Teach-In provided for its active participants a similar experience to the kind of social learning the Peruvian theatre director, educator and politician, Augusto Boal, describes in his book, Theatre of the Oppressed. Through a series of exercises working with groups Boal helps people to construct tableaux that capture the ways in which they feel powerless or oppressed, and also to imagine what a liberated condition would be like. Then, patiently different members of the group explore strategies to get from the situation of oppression to that of emancipation. Others in the group act out suggestions, until someone else disagrees. They take over the role of strategist, until they in turn give the role of ‘joker’ or organiser to another. Debate and exploration is protracted. This kind of political theatre gives people strategies to change their circumstances. It is powerful stuff, very much an example of Bhola’s category of adult education as culture.

In my own working life I was able to draw on the experience of the Teach-In that celebration and cultural action are often more effective forms of advocacy than conventional adversarial argument in a number of contexts, but nowhere more clearly than in the establishment of Adult Learners’ Week, which this year enjoys its tenth anniversary. It had some similarities to the Teach-In. It was established when politicians were doubting the value of adult learning for its own sake. This time they spoke about not wanting flower arranging on the taxes, until Donald McLeod, then writing for The Independent, found a Brixton florist who had started as a merchant banker, and gone to flower arranging classes as his industrial retraining, and employed half the class as staff. After that they said, we know floristry can lead to work!

To return to Adult Learners’ Week, it was conceived as a celebration of existing adult learners, as a way of motivating potential learners to join in. The idea was of course borrowed and adapted. American adult educators organised a week culminating in a congressional breakfast, at which adult learners were honoured. We borrowed from them, just as 35 other countries all over the world have now borrowed the idea from us and from each other, leading UNESCO to create the first International Adult Learners’ Week last year.

In the UK, NIACE was keen to harness the energies of television to tell the stories of outstanding learners, and to reach out to potential learners. The Department of Employment was persuaded to offer a free telephone helpline, which 55,000 people phoned – more than half of them long-term unemployed. A third of callers went on to take up courses. The social composition of the enquirers was strikingly different than the usual learner profile, with far more working class people phoning. All the major television companies took part, and there were several thousand local events. Celebrities hosted award events, and the All Party Parliamentary Group on Adult Education hosted a Parliamentary reception. A talented colleague worked out how the whole event might attract European Social Fund support. Most important of all, the Week gave adult learning a different public image. Almost overnight politicians stopped talking about underwater basket weaving, and other dismissive stereotypes, and began talking about the struggle adult learners engage in to change their lives through learning. It also gave adult learning a different visual iconography – as the posters show. From a marginal and invisible activity, it became an area of endeavour with its own visual narratives.

Each subsequent year has added new strands to the celebration – notably when the Employment Service agreed to put a piece of paper in every girocheque, encouraging people to phone the helpline. That has been a fixture since 1994, but we have yet to succeed in getting similar inserts in the family allowance book, or the pension book.

From the experience of Adult Learners’ Week, the case was made to Government to make the helpline a permanent year-round event. At first it met resistance. Instead, higher priority was given to the establishment of a cones helpline, (which I have always seen as a symbol of the Major administration). Hardly anyone rang it, and we were just planning a campaign to encourage people to phone the cones line to ask for advice on further education, when they closed it down. We have now had a permanent line, learndirect, for less than three years, and two million people have rung for advice.

At the heart of the success of Adult Learners’ Week is the combination it secures of the intimate and the national – the event at the end of the street and the TV programme; the individual learners’ story and the grand policy conference. Learners’ voices and their experiences, though, invariably provide the most memorable moments. When I was preparing this talk, one of this year’s nominations arrived at NIACE. Two boys, one seven, one ten, had nominated their mother. They wrote in support of the nomination:

"My mum back at school

I think it will be excellent because she has worked hard and she went to college every day and she comd back from college she cooked and went to bed at the right time and woken up at the right time and went back to college and got there just in time for a project. Stade for 5 hours and kamdbsack and had a rest, cooked dinner and dun her homework and went to bed and dun that everyday (son aged 7)

I think it is excellent that my mum went back to college, because when she came from college she used to be all happy. everyday she cleaned and made the dinner and took us out like going to the pictures and to parties and always take me to football. My sister was really ill in the hospital and she still cooked dinner, cleaned and looked after us, done her homework picked us up from school and took me football. I love my mum more than everything, my mum is wonderful" (son, aged 10)

Tom Sticht, the American adult literacy specialist, talks about the double-dealing dollar of family literacy – and NFER’s studies of the UK family literacy projects show how much motivation and skills gain children get when their parents are learning. Veronica McGivney’s research for the Pre-School Learning Alliance showed that inspiration comes the other way round, too (McGivney, 2000). People go to pre-schools to ensure broader opportunities for social contact, play and learning for their children. But they stay for themselves, and take the first steps back to learning, gaining confidence, taking responsibility, gaining qualifications; and as they do it, reinforcing the value of learning to others in their families and networks. Mind you, families are not always supportive of learning, as one of the diarists who contributed to our Diary of 1,000 Adult Learners project reported:

"Continue to work on essay from 10.00 until 1.00. I commented on the hours I have worked to my daughter who has been doing her GCSEs. She feels what I’m doing is a waste of time and perhaps she is right but I do enjoy learning. To continue my studying I find I will need to organise my days very carefully so as not to disturb the family’s routine.

I have been rather taken up with studying and doing my essay and the house is in a mess and my husband wasn’t very pleased this morning when there was no clean shirt. I was also a bit late with the tea tonight and we ended up with tuna and salad.

Essay still in progress and by the time I have finished it would have taken me 24 hours collecting facts, organising them into a reasonable essay and then typing it up.

Tutorial tomorrow which I’m looking forward to as it helps to learn that everyone is having problems and it’s not just me." (Coare and Thomson, ed.1996, p.156)

In addition to awards that celebrate individual achievement, Adult Learners’ Week has drawn attention to the learning people do as groups. One of the first groups to win an award, Castleford Women’s Centre, grew from the support work miners’ wives organised during the 1984 strike. When it was over, a group of wives decided it was time to do something for themselves. They talked Castleford Council (which was not an education authority) into letting them have a small terraced house rent free to establish a centre, where women could come to learn together. It was informal and convivial. New visitors were greeted with a cup of tea, encouragement, a recognition of the nerves many people feel going into a new setting. Existing learners shared their excitement, and energy. Within a few years the Centre was linked to a degree-giving programme at Leeds Metropolitan University. It had secured funding, expanded into new premises, and acted as a beacon to self-help projects across the country.

In a very different context the University of the Third Age, which has blossomed as state supported liberal education has been squeezed in many places, works in much the same way. Enthusiasm, agency, and the professionalism of the social inventor are inspiring. People who join in rapidly seek to emulate what has gone before.

And where there is such energy, it is not hard to motivate others to join in. Too often we prescribe the boundaries of the learning on offer too narrowly. As one student in a literacy class for adults with learning difficulties told my colleague Jeannie Sutcliffe a decade ago, ‘I want to learn about Jesus and history, and thunder and lightning.’

Public agencies can work through community organisations to strengthen capacity in the community, and the effective reach of services. The SHEBA project, in Smethwick was set up to address the communication difficulties which resulted in a low take-up of primary healthcare services by the local Bangladeshi community. Seven local Bangladeshi women were recruited, and led a health promotion project to share knowledge among women with little or no English. "We have broken down some of the stereotypes portrayed of passive and inarticulate Bangladeshi women," the group argued. "While keeping our awareness of cultural practices, we have shown Bangladeshi women in the community that they can take care of health for themselves without being dependent on their partners."

Not all outreach work has an immediate impact. Northern College, outside Barnsley, is rightly celebrated now for the reach of its residential short-course programmes, which provide for some of the most economically depressed communities in South Yorkshire. It clearly enjoys the confidence of groups that all too often see educational institutions as alien places. But that confidence was not bought cheaply. For three years in the 1970s, when the College opened, David Browning trudged from working men’s clubs to village institutes asking people how they might like to spend time away from everyday concerns. For a long time, there was nothing to show for his patience. Trust builds slowly, and our funding systems have been too impatient in the intervening years, to give enough time for new relationships to be developed that start from learners’ aspirations.

Outreach work, like lots of learning experiences, often ends up in a different place than you expect. When I worked for the ILEA, the Greater London Council funded a popular planning project in Battersea, and I asked Titus Alexander to co-ordinate it. We worked on alternate people’s plans for Battersea Power Station, which had just closed, attracting huge packed public meetings. But despite lots of energy it did not win the day. A group of black entrepreneurs produced Wandsworth Black Pages, to promote the work of black small businesses. But the development I want to highlight began with a borough-wide consultation among people working in childcare, as childminders, play workers, in the health and education services. The participants began with the concern to identify a reasonable consistency in pay and conditions. But two or three meetings in, it became clear that the disparities were too entrenched, and the political task too great. Just as the group was on the point of breaking up, there was a proposal to build a new supermarket at Clapham Junction. Representatives met the developer to make the argument for crèche facilities to be built into the supermarket. They reasoned that if the high proportion of single parents living in the high rise estates had to pay for childcare whilst they went shopping they would ‘go up town’. If the supermarket wanted their custom childcare would be a major incentive. The developer was convinced, and now such facilities are found in a string of supermarkets ringing the city. Pay and conditions for childcare remain a challenge. But the group felt that although they had arrived at a different destination, the journey had been worthwhile.

A lot of the examples I have chosen include some kind of public performance – taking the relatively private world of learning and sharing it with a wider community. That is exactly what happened when Norfolk Adult Education Service mounted a performance of an oratorio of Terry Waite’s Beirut prison poems, with the music written by an adult tutor, and a choir of all Norfolk’s music classes. The lead violinists were a man of 83 and a boy of 16. The performance filled Norwich cathedral. But as with many other public initiatives, it was run on short-term funding, and the resources to build on the success of the initiative were not available.

Not all the examples of adult education as culture are to be found in community based programmes. The Ford EDAP programme again borrowed from an initiative in the USA. In the States management and unions agreed a personal learning project for workers when the company was planning to shed labour, or downsize in the language of the time. In Britain the unions negotiated some £50 per worker, at the end of a wage bargaining round, for workers to study anything approved by local committees of blue and white collar unions with a management input – as long as the learning was not training. Individual workers could bid for up to £200 a person, and UEL supported the programme by employing a group of learning advisers, funded by EDAP to offer guidance to potential applicants. At first people learned to drive, to play golf, went on weekend courses to find out how to run a pub. Within three years people were studying languages, computing or signed up on Open University courses. As many blue collar workers as white collar workers took up the project, and over the years it has extended to offer opportunities for workers’ families (notably at Dagenham where there is a fathers and children family literacy project), and retired workers wonder if EDAP might be negotiated as part of pension rights. The gains to the company’s bottom line came from lower turnover of staff, reduced absenteeism, and an improvement in industrial relations conflict resolution. The scheme was rapidly copied across the motor sector, and in hundreds of other agencies. Curiously, EDAP was showing the value of learning for its own sake just as public bodies were becoming convinced that education for pleasure had little right to public subsidy.

EDAP’s pioneering role has been paralleled by the lead UNISON, the public sector trade union, has played in developing learning support as a key role for modern trade unions. In alliance with the Workers’ Educational Association, which itself has enjoyed a cultural renaissance in the last decade, UNISON has developed an access programme for members which takes them from first steps to fully blown university preparation courses. There are company universities galore now, as the boundaries between work and learning drop. Yet temporary and part-time staff still have a great struggle to get equality of access to training.

The last story I want to tell grew from a small-scale grant programme NIACE was able to manage, to distribute some year end money from the DfEE and to foster innovative practice. Each local education authority was offered a guaranteed £10,000 to be spent in six weeks at the end of the financial year on an initiative in one of ten areas to strengthen curriculum, to target new groups, or to improve the buildings in which adults learn. A group of largely middle aged women learners in Medway reached the pages of The Sun for their project, which was to construct a large male nude sculpture in a public space in the borough. The figure was generously endowed, and to cut a long story short, the piece was edited by local officials who cut off the sculpture’s private parts. Shocked but undaunted, the group organised a burial service for the severed part. There are echoes in the story of Victorian censorship of works of art, but also of the power of theatre. Like Liverpool’s Growing Old Disgracefully project, where pensioners give themselves permission to do things they would not previously have done (singing opera from an open-topped double decker, water-skiing on the Mersey) enjoyable learning can lead you to surprising places.

What then, is the point of all these stories? First, they point to a rich and continuing vein of popular action, in which people act to have more control over their lives. It is, I think, under-celebrated in the utilitarian discourses of our time. They illustrate David Blunkett’s vision of a learning society, in which communities shape their own future. And our efforts have a good claim to make on public support. Geoff Mulgan, who co-founded DEMOS before joining the Number 10 policy unit, wrote:

"In a world where governments no longer exercise much sovereignty either over their defences or over their economies, the best service they can perform for their citizens is to help them to be stronger, more responsible, more capable of making decisions and understanding the worlds in which they live. Narrowly this means providing them with skills to make them employable; the habits of being disciplined and flexible, creative and adaptive… More broadly it means helping them to look after themselves and to care for others, helping with life skills and emotional rather than just the analytical intelligence that older educational systems valued so highly." (Mulgan, 1997)

Or, as Bhola might say, we need cultures of learning to go along with our more formal systems.

However, it also seems to me that the stories illustrate the importance of four key skills for adult education as culture. They are dreaming, stealing, dancing, and showing off. The first, dreaming, is important since people need time and support to give themselves freedom to think outside of their everyday structures and experiences, to imagine new forms of association, and of learning. Second, stealing – or, less contentiously, a willingness to borrow good ideas and to test their usefulness for your own situation. Taking someone else’s ideas and adapting them is, I believe, a crime with no victim – though much of my schooling taught me not to share ideas, especially in the exam room. Third, dancing. The American revolutionary, Emma Goldman, said, memorably, ‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want to join your revolution.’ Harbans Bhola’s adult education as culture is infused with energy and joy, and so should ours be. And, finally, if you don’t show off other people can’t steal or borrow your ideas.

If we can share these skills, and the stories that inform them widely enough, there is, I believe, hope that we can build a society where the expression of our collective confidence to learn does mean that we can grow our own solutions to our problems, and have fun along the way.

Bibliography

Boal, Augusto (1984) Theatre of the Oppressed, London, Pluto

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