Culture and Processes of Adult Learning

Richard Edwards, Ann Hanson, Mary Thorpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138161597
• eBook ISBN: 9781136140525
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

The authors provide a variety of perspectives on the conceptualisation of adult learning, drawing on sociology, psychology, adult education and applied research into how adults experience learning. Bringing together a number of major contributions to current debates about what learning during adulthood is for, what motivates learning, and how best it might be developed, the authors address a range of significant issues: What should be the context of learning programmed for adults, and who should decide? What are the implications in general and for women in particular of the current emphasis on learning for work, at work? How do adults learn and how is learning best facilitated? How might learning be used to empower individuals, communities and organisations?

Part 1

Power, purpose and outcomes

Chapter 1

‘Really useful knowledge’, 1790–1850

Richard Johnson

Source: This is an edited version of a chapter in T. Lovett (ed.), Radical Approaches to Adult Education: A Reader, London, Routledge, 1988.

FEATURES

[…] Radical education [in early nineteenth-century England] was essentially an oppositional movement, gaining energies from contesting orthodoxies, in theory and practice. The first criticisms of the sorts of schooling which were provided were formed in the period up to 1820, under the shadow of a counter-revolution. The early schooling enterprises – Sunday Schools of the more conservative-Evangelical kind, the monitorial day schools, were seen as coercive and knowledge-denying. When more liberal schemes were put forward in the 1820s and 1830s – Mechanics’ Institutes, the Useful Knowledge Societies, infant schools, plans for state education – they were opposed too, though more conditionally. Before the 1860s there was not enough working-class support for state education to overcome the opposition of its Tory-Anglican opponents.

Criticism was not limited to opposition. Alternatives were proposed. Education was differently defined. It was partly a matter of religion. Radical education tended to be secular and rationalist; it drew on Enlightenment ideas of an expanding human nature.¹ But there was a polarization within Christianity too. Philanthropic educators inherited a Pauline, Hebraic, Puritan-Evangelical view of human nature as finite, limited and flawed. Since social evils like crime, riot, pauperism, ‘vice’ and even epidemic diseases were ‘moral’ at root, moral and religious education was the answer. Religion was a source of order, in society and in individuals; God was a kind of policeman in the sky. Radicals by contrast, developed the legacy of natural theology (God known only through Nature), and of Christianity as a morality of co-operation among equals. The morality of ‘that good man’ Jesus Christ was turned against inequality and injustice. There was also a real excitement about secular knowledges, especially as solvents of dogmatic religion and as keys to understanding society and human nature.²

A third feature was a preoccupation with education and politics, knowledge and power. Educating yourself and others, especially in a knowledge of your ‘circumstances’, was a step in changing the world. Knowledge was a natural right, an unconditional good. The typical middle-class argument – that only the ‘educated’ should be able to vote – was angrily dismissed. […]

Finally, radicals developed a varied, vigorous educational practice of their own. In a sense this was ‘adult education’. Yet this label misleads, reading back our modern separations anachronistically. Rather child/adult differences were less stressed than they are today, or than they were in the contemporary middle-class culture of childhood. […]

So radical education challenged the educational enterprises of ‘Church Christianity’ and the liberalism of the urban middle classes. It mounted alternatives in its philosophy, pedagogy and institutional arrangements. It was not merely a critical or oppositional movement, but counter-hegemonic, threatening to construct a whole alternative social order.

The success or failure of such an enterprise depended on all the relationships of force in early Victorian society, including the sheer weight of economic impositions and the control of military force. It did not depend on education alone, but on the contexts of the educational struggle.³ […]

TRANSFORMATIONS

So what were the modern conditions that were imposed and resisted at the time? I would not start with the imposition of schooling. Schooling was too marginal to daily life in this period to be the central site of change. It needs to be decentred in modern explanations too. It may be that schooling emerges as a solution to problems first posed elsewhere.

Changes at the place of waged work might be thought a better starting-point. The proletarianization of the worker was deeply formative. Like Thompson, we might think of this in terms of an initial loss: sometimes as erosion, sometimes as sudden theft of spaces for autonomy or self-activity. Marx stressed the loss or alienation of conscious sensuous human labour in the production of commodities for capital: the reduction of the worker to operative or ‘hand’. Thompson sees the loss as wider, including a deeper regulation of time and public spaces for instance (Thompson 1967). Feminist historians have brought whole new features of this transition into view, features equally central to educational change.⁴ Deepening proletarianization was accompanied by changes in the sex-gender arrangements of society. It sounds odd, but accurate I think, to speak of the formation of modern genders as well as classes; and so to explore the relation between the two.

We can think of gender formation, too, as deepened polarization or heightened difference, in this case between men and women in a model of heterosexual monogamy. The polarization of gender positions involved further privileging men in particular ways. Within the bourgeoisie and professional middle class, men and women were assigned to the ‘separate spheres’ of public life and domestic nurturance. Child-adult differences were given greater force as well. […]

In public discourses about the family (and much else besides) this patriarchal arrangement was heavily preferred. It involved an intense focus on the socialization of children as a specialized and separated activity, not necessarily involving school, but always some domestic division of labour.

There were similar transitions in working-class households, but with rather different results. The changes in production often involved a similar separation of the household from the place of waged work. Yet the division of labour was less complete. The characteristic destiny of the working-class woman was the double shift (some form of earning and domestic labour). The privileging of the working-class man was as the main breadwinner. Similarly, partly for reasons of space, partly for family income, the child and adult worlds could not be so sharply segregated, though compulsory schooling itself was to bring this pattern nearer. By the 1860s one can certainly see in philanthropic commentary, the figure of the ‘respectable’ working man, usually a skilled worker, often a trade unionist and follower of the Liberal Party. He keeps his wife at home and he sends his children to school. He bases his industrial strategies on the family wage (and often the exclusion of women) and favours state education, compulsory, secular and free. Yet this experience was only a sectional one within the working class as a whole, not easily universalized. (Barrett and Macintosh 1980)

Any adequate detailed account of the contest of radical education and provided forms (which we still lack) would have to take account of this shifting ensemble of relationships: the combined forms of class, gender and age-rank relations. I shall argue later that the provided forms of schooling won out because they were better adapted to the new conditions, and its relationships of time, space, or power, or so it seemed, in the short run. At the same time rupturing of older patterns was so severe, and the popular legacies were culturally so rich, that alternative possibilities for learning and living could emerge and be sustained for several decades.

DILEMMAS

Radical education revolved around a complicated and layered dilemma. Radicals valued ‘the march of mind’ for many different reasons. As in all periods of change there was a tension between conservation and transformation in popular responses. It was necessary actively to learn new ways because the older common senses were not enough any more; yet customary skills and cultural inheritances seemed all the more precious because they were threatened. Issues around literacy are a case in point. The ability to read was especially valued because its transmission was threatened in communities drastically affected by industrial change, handloom-weaving districts for example. Elementary accomplishments like reading and knowing how to sign your own name did decline in some areas in the early Industrial Revolution. Yet the desire to read and write was also very actively stimulated by the new conditions, especially by the great surges of popular political activity, with their extensive presses and expanding reading publics.

There was a heightened sense too of the educational condescensions of the rich and the powerful. The charge of popular ignorance, from Edmund Burke’s ‘swinish multitude’ to later liberal cajolings was deeply resented, especially as a way of blaming oppressions on the poor themselves. As William Cobbett put it:

The tyrant, the unfeeling tyrant, squeezes the labourers for gain’s sake; and the corrupt politician and literary or tub rogue find an excuse for him by pretending, that it is not want of food and clothing, but want of education, that makes the poor starving wretches thieves and beggars.

(Cobbett 1967: 265–6)

Positively, radicals looked to their own education to remove superstition and combat the ideological resources of authority. […]

At the same time radicals were acutely aware of educational difficulties, an awareness often enforced by personal experience. Sometimes these were a poverty of resources: lack of books, teachers, time, energy, peace and quiet. In the best radical writing about education, that most in touch, I think, with the pressures on most working people, enlightenment ambitions meet a powerful sense of imposed constraints, material and cultural. Sometimes the conditions are portrayed as absolutely incompatible with any education at all. Such insights were widespread in the later years and in movements based on the industrial North and Midlands. […]

As if this were not enough, the growth of provided education after 1830 brought further twists to the dilemma. First you were excluded from learning by the absence of resources or household conditions. Then, once available, the proferred knowledges turned out to be wildly inappropriate. Far from promising liberation, this knowledge threatened subjection. At best it was a laughable diversion – useless knowledge in fact. At worst it added, to the long list, yet another kind of tyranny. […] Cobbett, for instance, the original de-schooler, had no doubts about the objects of the monitorial school:

They wish to make cheap the business of learning to read, if that business be performed in their schools; and thus inveigle the children of poor men into those schools; and there to teach those children, along with reading, all those notions which are calculated to make them content in a state of slavery.⁵

[…] By the 1830s the new forms of provided education had appeared, some of them less obviously knowledge-denying than older forms. Yet a critical distance was maintained, especially from the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and its Penny Magazine. There was a host of jokes on all possible permutations of ‘useful knowledge’:

In conformity with the advice of Lord Brougham and the Useful Knowledge Society, the Milton fishermen, finding their occupation gone, have resolved to become capitalists forthwith.⁶

[…] So, despite the jokes, dilemmas deepened. It was ‘really useful knowledge’ that was wanted; ‘education-mongers’ offered its opposite. […] So how was the genuine article to be obtained? How were radicals to educate themselves, their children, their class, their brothers and sisters, within all the everyday constraints? Overwhelmingly the answer, in this period, was we must do it ourselves! That way, independence could be preserved, and real knowledge won. We can understand radical education best, perhaps, as the story of these attempts. […]

FORMS

The key feature was informality. Certainly, radicals founded their own institutions. In the late 1830s and 1840s there were even schemes for a whole alternative system. The Owenite and Chartist mainstreams, however, looked askance at the more ambitious projects.

Typically, then, radical education differed from the provided kind in its actual organizational principles. Education was not separated out and labelled ‘school’. It did not happen in specialized institutions. Even when Political Unions, Chartists and Owenites formed their own secular Sunday Schools, or newspaper reading rooms or Halls of Science, these were part of the cultural politics of the branch. The frequent emphasis on a meeting place of your own had less to do with specialized uses than escaping from the control of magistrate or publican (and perhaps from domestic space?) and having a physical focus for local activity. The crucial division that radicals refused, of course, was that between education and politics: hence their contestation of the ‘no politics’ rule in Mechanics’ Institutes, and the occasional secessions to form a political forum of their own.⁷

Solutions were highly improvised, haphazard and therefore ephemeral. From one point of view – the building of a long-term alternative – this was a weakness, but it had strengths too. Education remained in a close relation to other activities, was even inserted into them. People learned in the course of their daily activities, and were encouraged to teach their children too, out of an accumulated and theorized experience. The modern distinction between education (i.e. schooling) and life (everything outside the playground walls or off campus) was certainly in the process of production in this period. Philanthropy espoused the public school as a little centre of missionary influence in an alien social world. Radicals breached this distinction, however, all the time, often quite self-consciously. As George Jacob Holyoake put it, ‘Knowledge lies everywhere to hand for those who observe and think’ (Holyoake 1892). It lay in nature, in the social circumstances of daily life, in the skills of labour, in conversations with friends, in the play of children, as well as in a few much-prized books.

It is often hard to separate radical initiatives from the inherited cultural resources of the people more generally. There were complex interleavings and dependencies here. It is not sensible to see the working-class family, neighbourhood or place of work as a part of radical education. Yet these were – or had been – the main educational spaces for working people. Radicals occupied them accordingly, often giving them a new twist. They taught their children to read and to think politically. They became accepted as the local ‘scholar’ of the neighbourhood. They led workplace discussions on ‘the hardness of the times’. Similarly, when they became private schoolteachers, often more out of necessity than choice, they occupied one node of educational networks indigenous to working-class communities. Radicals did not invent the proto-profession of travelling lecturer, but they certainly expanded and politicized it: hence the travelling demagogues of Chartism, the Owenite ‘social missionaries’, and the women lecturers who found a place in Owenism through its religious heterodoxy, critique of conventional marriage and commitment to gender equality (Taylor 1983). […]

Radicals also added some inventions of their own. The simplest addition was the meeting place or reading-room, stocked with radical newspapers.⁸ More ambitious and continuous radical branches organized a whole calendar of events, including lectures and classes, plus one-off special events like big public meetings or the public confrontations with the clergy sought especially by Owenites. The most important radical invention of all was the press. It was not the respectable ‘Fourth Estate’ that created a popular newspaper-reading public, but the law-breaking, speculative journalists of the radical press (Thompson 1963). With some exceptions – particularly the Chartist Northern Star – ‘newspaper’ is rather a misnomer. Really we are talking about argumentative, opinionated little magazines, essentially concerned with commentary and analysis, often in support of particular movements. Most were saturated with an educational content. […]

As a form these ‘newspapers’ were very versatile. Some parts, like the Poor Man’s Guardian’s expositions needed pondering over and discussing. Other parts, like Cobbett’s or Feargus O’Connor’s addresses, could be declaimed aloud in pub or other public place. Radi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Power, purpose and outcomes
• Part 2 Adulthood and learning
• Part 3 Learners’ experience and facilitating learning
• Author index
• Subject index