Tom Nesbit et al. Symposium
Global perspectives on social class and adult education
Tom Nesbit
Simon Fraser University, Canada
Kjell Rubenson
University of British Columbia, Canada
Lyn Tett
University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Shahrzad Mojab
OISE/University of Toronto, Canada
Michael Newman
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Symposium presented at the 36th Annual SCUTREA Conference, 4-6 July 2006, Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds
Social class is a major determining factor of accomplishment in most educational, employment, and social arenas; still one of the best predictors of who will achieve success, prosperity, and social status. Yet, class has proved both difficult to define and to discern. Empirically, it can really only be examined through its consequences or outcomes. Thankfully, education is so central in the functioning of advanced industrial societies that it offers fertile ground for the investigation and analysis of class. Education closely influences personal and social development, both in the technical and economical spheres but also in the wider arenas of emancipation and democracy. Education also affects how people experience social, cultural and economic forces and shapes people’s abilities and dispositions towards transforming these forces. Because of this, education has always been a site of struggle between those with the power to define what constitutes legitimate knowledge and those excluded from such decision making. These aspects of education are closely related to issues of social class. Ideas about class influence the goals and purposes of education, its forms and approaches, where and when it takes place and who participates in it. Class not only affects these elements, but also shapes how we think about them.
Adult education is not immune from these trends. Whatever its particular focus, approach, or clientele, adult education is an essentially political project. The struggles for power—who has it, how they use it, and in whose interests—lie at the heart of the adult education enterprise. Concerned with identity and personal and social change, adult education seeks to provide the knowledge, skills, and attitudes for people to engage more fully in their individual and social worlds. And it’s in the political realm, encompassing both the individual and the social, that the effects of class are most clearly visible.
Adult education is generally intended to ameliorate the personal and social disadvantages created by one’s circumstances and background. However, although its history bears testament to some remarkable educational achievements, too often adult education merely serves to clarify or, worse, exacerbate existing disadvantages. So it’s not surprising that social divisions and the tensions they bring about are seen as critical issues in adult education. In fact, the literature of adult education contains several trenchant analyses of the educational approaches, structures, and activities that perpetuate the silence and invisibility of marginalized and disenfranchised groups. Unsurprisingly, this literature is also permeated with regular exhortations to consider class, race and gender (and more latterly, sexual orientation) as prime markers of social division.
Yet, in comparison with its counterparts, the study of social class has been relatively under-explored by adult educators—particularly in North America. Although there exist several insightful analyses of social class in several other areas of educational endeavour (e.g., Apple, 1995; Ball, 2003, Carnoy & Levin, 1985; Halsey, Lauder, Brown, & Wells, 1997; Archer, Hutchins, & Ross, 2003), it has not similarly engaged scholars of adult education. For example, two of the most recent comprehensive introductions to adult education in North America (Merriam & Cunningham, 1989; Wilson & Hayes, 2001) list neither class nor social class in their indexes even though several of their chapters are clearly informed by such ideas. Further, recent searches of ERIC (the major North American educational database) combining the descriptors adult education with gender, race, and social class produce totals of 533, 324, and 86 hits respectively. Assuming that the number of references roughly correlates with research interests, why do researchers so significantly less acknowledge class than its counterparts? Why is class so underrepresented in social and educational theory? Why is class ignored as the elephant in the room (hooks, 2000)?
To redress such concerns, this symposium examines the role of class in relation to recent adult learning and lifelong education policies and practices. Each presenter explores how class shapes a specific area of practice as well as their own role as practitioners. They focus upon the importance of adopting a class perspective, the areas of policy, research and adult literacy education, how class intersects with the related vectors of race and gender and the role of adult education in stimulating defiance. Finally, because class is understood and appreciated differently around the world, the symposium highlights such diversity by deliberately involving authors from several different countries.
The importance of a class perspective
Class can mean different things to different people: a theoretical device for analyzing the social world; shared social conditions; or a set of particular orientations, beliefs, and life practices. Popular understandings of class still describe it in terms of jobs, income, wealth, the lifestyles that people can buy, or the power that accrues from ownership. Yet, class is less a possession than a dynamic: a relationship between different people and groups divided along axes of power and privilege. So class differences play out in power relations. And adult education plays a critical role in forming and mediating these relations: providing opportunities for personal mobility while legitimating social inequality. Thus, adopting a class perspective on adult education does two things: it draws clear links between educational institutions, the world of work, and the economic system that underpins them; and it highlights how educational institutions function to maintain and inculcate societal ideology and values.
Many adult educators find such a perspective overwhelming and off-putting. Others question the extent to which adult educators should critique dominant social systems and the prevailing capitalist system. Yet the many and varied ways that class shapes adult education continue to demand our attention. As Apple (1995) and others have cogently argued, adult education is a function of the state and is therefore regulated according to certain economic, political, and cultural interests and pressures. Second, educational institutions are situated in historical and social contexts that suggest that adult education is intimately linked with maintaining particular cultural and social arrangements. Third, adult educators should closely consider class because of how it plays out in their everyday situations and practices. For example, consider teaching: what educators teach and how they teach are choices made from a wider universe of knowledge and values. Such choices always benefit and privilege some while ignoring, downplaying, or deprivileging others; curricular and pedagogical choices reflect different ways of understanding and responding to social relations. Fourth, political choices imbricate the adult education profession itself. Consider teaching again: some people are considered worthy or accredited to teach adults; others are not. And, as many adult education practitioners realize on a daily basis, there are concomitant struggles over autonomy, respect, wages, workload, job security, evaluation, and accountability.
So, adult educators, professional people engaged with most aspects of human endeavour, need to appreciate and understand the complexities of class. Such an approach offers two immediate benefits. First, it helps “subvert the tendency to focus only on the thoughts, attitudes, and experiences of those who are materially privileged” (hooks, 2000, p. 185). Second, it benefits learners: “the more we can recognize and understand working-class culture, the more clearly we can recognize the strengths of our working-class students and…better our chances of engaging and inspiring them” (Linkon, 1999, p. 6).
Adult learning policy
The adult education literature contains several paradoxes; one of them is the lack of engagement with social class, particularly in comparison to gender and race. This lack of interest is curious as social class remains one of the best predictors of social, economic and cultural capital and is closely linked to engagement in adult learning (Nesbit, 2006). Further, with adult and lifelong learning becoming the new religion promising to fix the economy and address current social challenges the distribution of learning opportunities across different segments of the population ought to have become the crucial issue. It is in this context that this section of the symposium briefly discusses what might explain the rare attention to social class in the policy discourse and the academic literature as well as why there are significant differences across countries in this respect.
A fundamental assumption in this presentation is that the reluctance to engage with class in adult and lifelong learning policies should be understood as a consequence of a reduced capacity in organizing political opposition to the influence of the capitalist class. As Korpi (1983) points out, the difference in power resources in a society between major collectives or classes, particularly capital and organized labour regulates the distribution of life chances, social consciousness, and conflicts in the labour market. Labour has potential access to political resources “which can allow it to implement social reform and alter distributional inequalities to a significant degree” (Olsen & O’Connor, 1998, p. 8). Thus, Korpi (1998, p.54) suggests “that the extent of bias in functioning of the state can vary considerable as a reflection of the distribution of power resources in these societies and thus that politics can be expected to matter. e.g. for the distributive processes in society.” The lack of attention to class issues in present policy discussions can be explained by changes in social relations of the economy, political parties and family that have resulted in a decline in class voting (Niuwberta, 2004). In a response left parties have increasingly become socially and ideologically pluralistic and have chosen to appeal more to the expanding middle strata and not concentrate exclusively on its traditional base, industrial workers and the poor (Lipset 2004). Like post-Fordist production, politics tends to become specialized and issue-centred in its response to a population that is increasingly being differentiated by educational attainment and skills, gender, generation, ethnicity and sexual preferences (Pakulski, 2004). Similarly, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002, p. 30) observe that while structures of social inequality displays a surprising stability questions concerning inequality are no longer perceived and politically handled as a class question. The explanation is to be found in Beck’s analysis of the individualization process that during the last three decades has accompanied the evolution of the risk society (Beck, 1992). Consequently trade unionist and political modes of action have entered into competition with individually centred legal and medical or psychotherapeutic remedies and compensations. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim stress that this value system of individualization is embedded in a new ethics which is based on the principle of duty to oneself (op.cit. p 38).
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s perspective seems to resonate closely with present trends in adult and lifelong learning policies. Thus, a fundamental assumption in the present discourse on lifelong learning is that lifelong learning is an individual project. It becomes the responsibility of persons to make adequate provision for the creation and preservation of their own human capital.
Recognizing that EU member states are responsible for their education and training systems, the 2000 Memorandum on lifelong learning—as well as later ones—points out that these systems are dependent upon the input and commitment of a wide range of actors from all walks of social and economic life. However, with special emphasis on the individual, the paper goes on to state (EC, 2000 p. 4), “and not the least upon the efforts of individuals themselves, who, in the last instance, are responsible for pursuing their own learning”. Further, workers do not seem to be part of policy makers’ definitions of target groups for lifelong learning. Instead, following Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s individualization thesis (2002) we can notice that inequality is not presented and addressed as a class question in present day policy documents but in terms of various at-risk groups (migrants, ethnic minorities, refugees and those lacking ICT skills to mention the most commonly identified populations). In this respect most policy document bears clear witness to “the new politics” and post-Fordist production politics commented on above.
The situation is somewhat different in the Nordic countries where working class interests still have a noticeable impact on adult education and training policies and where the nation state still is central in determining access to learning opportunities (Rubenson, in press). These differences can be explained by the differences in welfare state regimes. Thus, when we try to understand the formation of adult learning in a time of economic and social challenges it is important that the Nordic welfare state, founded on working class political power, is still in place with its institutional arrangements and traditions. However, it is important to note that the drive towards individualization, as outlined by the Becks has not escaped the Nordic welfare state regime. Thus, in a fundamental shift from the traditional Social Democratic position on adult education recent Swedish policy documents stress that it is seen as essential to begin with the needs of the individual as the starting-point for planning social measures (Sweden, 2000). While the language of the reform Bill strongly resembles global ideas it is important to observe that the discourse is different to the neo-liberal one in that the state is clearly a player.
The power resources of the Nordic working class have not only impacted on the policy framework but also on the research agenda. In contrast to the situation in North America, where it is rare to find adult education scholars outside the area of sociology of work engaging with class, this concept has always been in the forefront of Nordic adult education research. In fact the development of adult educational research in Sweden was closely linked to the field becoming a major topic for public policy in the 1970s. Driven by the unions' aspirations for radical reforms in society publicly funded adult education research became a key instrument in the reform strategy. This differs fundamentally from the situation in North America where it has been the process of professionalisation and the challenges to provide practitioners with useful knowledge that has driven the evolution of adult education as a field of study.
In sum, the lack of a working class interest in research and the political project on lifelong learning is paradoxical in view of the well documented centrality of work in the everyday lived life of lifelong learning. The future will depend on whether or not working class forces can break the present trend which, in the words of Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) is making the class society insignificant besides an individualized society of employees.