Will adult learning ever be popular?

Keith Forrester and John Payne, University of Leeds, UK.

Paper presented at SCUTREA, 30th Annual Conference, 3-5 July 2000, University of Nottingham

The lack of concern for how the economical, political and cultural structure in society influence adult education is reflected in the North American debate on the future of adult education … Reading the debate, one gets a picture of the adult educator with a firm grip on the rudder keeping the vessel on the right course. However, no-one seems to ask where the wind and the waves are coming from. (Rubenson, 1980: 13) (our emphasis)

What’s the problem?

We have been aware for some time that there is a ‘pressure of the new’ within the academic profession. This is especially true in the field of lifelong learning just at this moment in time. During the first three years of the Labour government elected in 1997, policy initiatives have come thick and fast. These have included the establishment and reports of the National Advisory Group on Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning (NAGCELL) (Fryer, 1997), a Green Paper (DfEE, 1998) and a White Paper (DfEE, 1999b), the publication of a prospectus for the Learning and Skills Councils which will replace the existing Training and Enterprise Councils (DfEE, 1999b), and the important work of the National Skills Task Force (DfEE, 2000). There have also been the announcements of plans for the University for Industry (UfI, now to be referred to as ‘learndirect, and incorporating the national telephone helpline of the same name). However, with the important exceptions of Individual Learning Accounts and the telephone helpline, most of these initiatives have tended to locate the problem of establishing ligelong learning as a ‘supply-side’ problem. Less effort has been expended in thinking about how demand can be stimulated and where the motivation to learn comes from.

This paper consciously seeks to go back over a quarter of a century of intellectual history and in particular to review the relevance of Allen Tough’s concept of the ‘adult learning project’, and the work of the ‘New’ Sociology of Education to the brave new world of lifelong learning. It therefore seemed appropriate to begin the article with an equally ‘historical’ quote from Rubenson which establishes the perspective of the paper from its outset. It will be our purpose in this paper to argue that ‘where the wind and waves are coming from’ is determined by two apparently contradictory factors:

  • those social and economic forces referred to as ‘globalisation’ but more properly described as the development of a global information network society (Castells, 1996) and the development of a two-thirds-one third society (Lash, 1994: 130; Castells, 1996: 102/3) of socially included and excluded;
  • the lives of social actors in which the innate curiosity and intelligence of the human being gives ‘learning’ a different set of meanings from those which it possesses in the professional and policy discourse of ‘lifelong learning’.

It is, furthermore, our contention that a fresh eye for the ‘learning’ which takes places beyond the realm and reach of formal educational institutions can re-awaken interests in another apparently forgotten corner of adult education studies – the curriculum, and ‘context of knowledge, culture and power’ (Keddie, 1984: 79) in which it exists. In the attempt to involve more and more people in ‘lifelong learning’ we should not lose sight of the force of Michael Young’s core statement of the concerns of the ‘New’ Sociology of Education:

Sociologists seem to have forgotten … that education is not a product like cars or bread, but a selection and organisation from the available knowledge at a particular time which involved conscious or unconscious choices. (Young, 1971: 24)

This statement can be taken as referring to adult educators and trainers who have never known as well as their sociological colleagues who may have once known. Young draws too on an earlier source – Raymond Williams’ (1961: 125) dictum that ‘what is thought of as “an education” (is) in fact a particular selection, a set of emphases and omissions’.

Participation Studies

The general assumption in the academic literature on adult learning has been that the non-participation in organised learning activities of a majority of the adult population is a problem. This approach dominates Courtney’s (1992) account of the ‘subject’ (which he calls ‘PAE’, or participation in adult education), in which he moves from psychological explanations of the phenomenon to more social accounts, in which participation in organised learning is seen as related to participation in other forms of social life (voluntary organisations, sporting groups, Parent Teacher Associations and so on). From a UK perspective, the most important trajectory lies in the policy debate leading up to the recent British government White Paper ‘Learning to Succeed’ (DfEE, 1999a). Sargant et al (1997) adopt the rhetorical claim of a ‘learning divide’, in which Britain is again, as in Victorian times, ‘two nations’ (of those who do and do not participate in lifelong learning).

With the publication of the Kennedy Report (FEFC, 1997) and the election of a Labour government in 1997 committed to ‘lifelong learning’, the notion of ‘widening participation’ in all forms of post-compulsory education became a band-wagon, at least in rhetorical terms, which impacted to varying degrees on most of the publications referred to in the opening paragraph of this paper. In practical terms, the effects were less marked. For example, regular quarterly reviews of workplace education and training (the Labour Force Survey) have shown that training activity increased from 10.5% of the workforce to 15.9% between 1986 and 1999, only 1.1% of this growth took place during the 1990s (DfEE, 2000: 20). While the cumulative effects of such initiatives as the Trade Union Learning Fund, the Adult and Community Learning Fund, Widening Provision in further education and in university adult continuing education have been considerable, and have done a good deal for morale among adult educators, the core of all provision (FE, HE and local authority adult education) continues to be dominated by learners who are, on average, younger, better educated and more affluent than the population as a whole.

A ‘Tough’ furrow to plough?

This lop-sided participation in lifelong learning relates to our first point about participation being a question of ‘participation in what?’, and this relationship will be taken up again later in the paper. For the moment we wish to address the whole area from a different historical perspective. Allen Tough in his seminal work The adult’s learning projects (Tough, 1971 and 1979), based on extensive field-work by a team of Canadian researchers, made some very remarkable claims, for example:

Almost everyone undertakes at least one or two major learning efforts a year, and some individuals undertake as many as 15 or 20. The median is eight learning projects a year, involving eight distinct areas of knowledge and skill. (…)

About 70% of all learning projects are planned by the learner himself, who seeks help and subject matter from a variety of acquaintances, experts, and printed sources. Other learning projects rely on a group or instructor, on private lessons or on some nonhuman resources. (Tough, 1979: 1)

Tough’s work suggests that most adults engage in deliberate learning projects as part of their normal ‘going on’ in the world. For those of who became adult educators in or around 1980, Tough’s work had a significant impact, suggesting as it did that our activities might have more in common with a wider pattern of human activities viewed as ‘adult learning’ than with the various familiar professional and institutional categories of further education, higher education, adult education, training and so on.

We used the Web of Science database of academic articles published since 1981 to trace the trajectory of Tough’s influence on academic authors since 1981. There is a significant reduction in the number of ‘general’ citations of Tough (lifelong learning and educational research) in the post-1990 period. Even in the earlier period, a significant number of these references are primarily concerned with Knowles’ (1980) theories of ‘self-directed learning’, and reflect an incorporation of Tough’s work into the broader professional field of adult learning theory. Indeed the title of Tough’s 1982 work, with its reference to ‘helping people change’ suggests that Tough’s own concerns were marching in that particular direction too (cf Welton, 1995: 77). Some of this work is based specifically within the psychology of learning. There is a significant ongoing interest in Tough’s theories in relation to older learners, perhaps because this is a group which has, in general, more time for ‘learning projects’ but is less likely to be involved in formal, organised adult learning, including workplace learning. However, our broad conclusion is that the major ongoing influence of Tough’s work lies in a variety of specialised forms of professional education and development, including medicine, management and other forms of continuing professional development, rather than in the field of lifelong learning research.

It is interesting to see how Courtney (1992: 111) avoids confronting the full implications of Tough’s work by positing a distinction between adult education as a ‘personal’ reality and adult education as a ‘social’ reality. In (correctly) claiming the latter as the field of participation studies, he ignores the obvious point that adult participation in self-directed learning project is itself a social phenomenon. Collins sees the incorporation of Tough’s work into specialised professional fields as, in a way, implicit in his own (Tough’s) desire to present adult learning itself as a discrete professional field:

The major achievement of Tough’s work is to present the far from novel insight … that adults learn on their own initiative, construing self-directed learning in such a way as to provide an arena for professional intervention by adult education practitioners … (Tough’s publications) do not endeavour to explore the meanings, in context, and cognitive structures that adults bring to their learning endeavours. (Collins, 1991: 23)

Our task, then, is to place Tough’s major empirical finding alongside two points established earlier in the paper:

  • Most adults regularly engage in independent learning projects (self-directed learning theory)
  • Only a minority of adults engage in formal education and training (participation studies)
  • What adults learn within formal settings is deeply problematic (‘new’ sociology of education).

Changing the angle of attack

This paper, then, takes the view that, in so far as there is a problem about participation in adult learning, it is located in the apparent limited ability of formal providers of adult education and training to engage with the interests and enthusiasms of the adult population across a range of ‘difference’. This proposition also appears to accord more readily with other cultural features of British life, including the popularity of television documentaries and pub quizzes, support by adults for children learning at school, and the high level of informal learning that goes on within the organisations of civil society (Elsdon et al, 1995). Indeed, there is some practice which suggests that such an engagement is quite possible (Stuart and Thomson, 1995; Ainley, 1994). Taken together, both theoretical analysis and empirical data would indicate that Tough’s work, despite the limitations of his own analytical procedures, suggests a different starting-point for a consideration of the role of learning in the lives of social actors, from the starting-point adopted by most participation studies. That starting-point would be broadly the missed opportunity indicated (above) by Collins: ‘the meanings, in context, and cognitive structures that adults bring to their learning endeavours’. (Collins, 1991: 23)

Some emerging empirical evidence also begins to cast doubt on the professional assumption about the reluctance of adults to participate in learning. For example, the DfEE (La Valle and Finch, 1999) have compared the findings of the National Adult Learning Survey (NALS) which covered a three-year period during 1994-97 with a follow-up survey covering an 18-month period in 1997-99. This second survey is called Pathways in Adult Learning (PAL). This showed that 28% of those classified as ‘non-learners’ in NALS reported learning in PAL. While only 56% reported learning in both periods, 81% reported learning in one or both periods. Payne’s (1999) survey of holders of Individual Learning Accounts in the Dorset Tec area also produced anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon, despite his use of the familiar categories of regular, occasional and non-learners:

… these figures cast some doubt on the validity of claims (my own included) that there is a ‘learning divide’ between those who regularly participate and those who do not. What the figures here suggest is a pattern where people move in and out of learning just as they might move in and out of other activities. Thus any study of participation becomes a snap-shot rather than a panoramic view based on people’s careers and life histories. One man of 35-44, for example, ticked ‘regularly’ in question 1 but wrote in: ‘But over last 7 years. Not before.’ So he must have been at least 28 years old before starting on his adult learning. (Payne, 1999: 11)

Other important evidence comes from:

  • The success of the UNISON Return to Learn scheme with members in mainly ‘unskilled’ jobs and with few formal qualifications (Kennedy, 1995)
  • The success of a number of Union Learning Fund projects which have extended participation to groups who have been traditionally defined as ‘non-participants (Shaw, 1999)
  • Employee Development Schemes across a range of industries (Forrester et al, 1995) which have placed an emphasis on a wide variety of learning and employee choice in learning
  • Adult and Community Learning Fund projects which have attempted to extend the range of local authority adult education in terms of modes of delivery, place and time of learning, and course content

What many of these projects and schemes have in common is that they begin to explore some of the constraints and limitations of formal learning, include workplace training, and to engage with a more basic enthusiasm for learning among people. They begin to suggests the circumstances under which non-participants or occasional participants may become regular participants and thereby enhance both their individual life-chances and the liveliness of the communities in which they live. The terms of their possible social inclusion through learning (rather than the bald fact of their participation or non-participation) is seen as being of paramount importance. This paper questions, then, whether a definition of participation which only considers existing formal learning, and further adopts a ‘snapshot’ (synchronic) approach to participation at particular points in the life course is able to capture the complexity of adult learning patterns. We would suggests that

  • The overall issue is the extent to which formal adult learning (which we understand to be the field of interest of participation studies) does or does not engage with the larger-scale and longer-term contexts which shape the learning aspirations of social actors
  • A diachronic approach to learning in the longer context of the life history suggests that individual social actors move freely between bureaucratic categories such as ‘regular’, ‘occasional’ and ‘non’ participation during the life course (Payne, 1999), and also between formal and informal learning.
  • Tough’s original theoretical work on ‘adult learning projects’, based on a significant quantity of empirical evidence, suggests that most adults engage in deliberate learning projects as part of their normal ‘going on’ in the world. It has failed to influence decisively the approach to participation studies, partly because of his own preoccupations with adult education as a professionalised activity.
  • More sophisticated models are needed to describe participation in adult learning, models which might enlighten the working methods of formal providers of adult learning. Such models would acknowledge the context in which social actors live their lives and both the possibilities and constraints which they experience in their daily lives.

Work in progress

There are discontinuities between informal and formal learning. If these discontinuities are to be overcome, then it will be necessary to consider not just those sorts of learning projects which adults engage in consciously, but also the overlapping area of informal learning captured by the term ‘situated’ learning. This implies the type of learning which arises incidental to a person’s active involvement in a job, a voluntary organisation or an activity such as playing a sport or coping with an illness. Let us, for a moment, choose to consider learning projects and informal (situated) learning as the ‘public’ world of learning – public in the sense that it is a major part of the day-to-day lives of social actors – while the professional field of formal learning becomes the ‘private’ world of learning – private in the sense of being a relatively unusual activity which most adults take part in on a sporadic basis. It follows that only an engagement with informal learning in all its variety will allow formal education and training to re-establish its links with the world of adult enthusiasms, interests and desires. To refer back to our historical starting-points again, we need to take fresh account of the insistence of educators such as Young and Keddie who pointed out that participation in any kind of learning is not just a question of ‘access’, but of ‘access to what?’ and ‘under whose terms?’. At the same time, we must apply those understanding specifically to adult learning and to the new context of a new century, with all its new (and not-so-new) challenges and problems.