Trouble with words: the state of the language of adult education
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 32nd Annual Conference, 2-4 July 2002, University of Stirling
Ian Martin, University of Edinburgh & Barbara Merrill, University of Warwick
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In from the cold, but in to what?
Adult education - and, in particular, adult learning - have never been more central to the demands of both the state and the economy. This is evidenced in the mushrooming of the lifelong learning industry in privatised forms of learning to learn/earn, personal development, self-empowerment, education as leisure, human resource development, retraining and up-skilling etc etc. Whatever the current vogue for lifelong learning may mean, there is undoubtedly a good living to be made here. So, in a sense, adult learning has come in from the cold. But come in to what?
The problem of language, stated in general
One way of answering this question is to look at the changing language of adult education. Adult education is a social practice, and our argument is that language is important because a social practice is partly constituted by the language we use to describe it and to engage in it. The relationship between language and practice is reciprocal:
It is true to say that our social practices help bestow meaning on our social vocabulary. But it is equally true that our social vocabulary helps to constitute the character of those practices. (Skinner, 1980)
Frowe (2001) makes a crucial distinction in clarifying the character, purpose and effect of language in relation to natural practices, on the one hand, and social practices, on the other. Natural practices describe and engage with the external, objectively existing world which is outside us. The language we use to understand, organise, record and communicate this objective, independent and pre-existing reality remains 'passive' and outside it because it does not change it by 'entering into what it is about'. In contrast, language is active and constructive in relation to social practices, like education. The way in which we use language to discuss education as a social practice helps to constitute that practice; it becomes imbued with the values and aspirations (and, indeed, errors) we bring to the discussion of it. To a significant extent, therefore, we make it what it is by the way we talk about it.
For us, the problem is, in short, that the dominant discourse of education today wilfully forgets that education is a social practice, and seeks actively to reconstitute it as a natural practice. Moreover, the hegemony of 'marketspeak' renders this linguistic objectification of education in terms of commodification: 'curricula are "delivered", parents become "consumers", and schools are assessed on "output" characteristics' (Grace, 1994).
In using this kind of language, we become controlled by it: our agency is reduced to being its agent. In a powerful critique of the current orthodoxy, Frank Coffield (1999) argues that the discourse of lifelong learning has, in recent years, come not only to be dominated by but also actively reconstructed in the language of a 'degraded version' of human capital theory - a kind of linguistic hijacking:
.... the language of one research area within economics has hijacked the public debate and discourse of professionals so that education is no longer viewed as a means of individual and social emancipation, but as either 'investment' or 'consumption', as having 'inputs' and 'outputs', 'stocks' which 'depreciate' as well as 'appreciate', and it is measured by 'rates of return', an approach which produces offensive jargon such as 'overeducated graduates' and 'monopoly producers'.
When we enter into this language, it enters into us: it tells us what to do, and we tell ourselves to do it. It 'disciplines the subject' and we become the agents of our own surveillance (see Edwards and Usher, 1994). How many of today's budding entrepreneurs of lifelong learning came into adult education as public servants? How many of us still pause to blanch at institutional exhortations to 'commercialise' our 'intellectual property' - even when they lead to such arrant nonsense as this quotation from a recent Universities Scotland memo on developing something called 'research metrics'?
The commercialisation features list is comprehensive but it does not include any measure of the number of 'ideas' that must be generated before a patentable (commercially viable) entity appears. This of course is related to the commercialisation ethos that an organisation has established. Research in this area suggests that a few thousand 'ideas' must be put in the top of an ideas funnel for initial assessment before one or two innovations appear at the bottom. This is the fuzzy hidden edge of innovation: it is important but it is not clear how it should be monitored.
What is happening is that the SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-related) language of efficiency and effectiveness (what works), which is itself a byproduct and servant of the market, is consistently asserted over ethics (what's worth doing). As Stephen Ball (quoted in Fielding, 1999) puts it: 'The humanistic commitments of the substantive professional – the service ethic – are replaced by the teleological promiscuity of the technical professional – the manager'. In effect, means are insistently and consistently put before ends. As Briton (1996: 29) argues:
Why are educators and other cultural workers long committed to modernity’s ideals of liberty and freedom for all – not just the privileged few – willing to tolerate this resurgence of reactionary, antimodernist sentiment, this emergent narcissistic politics of selfishness and greed? Why do educators in the realm of adult and higher education find themselves unable to respond to the regressive politics of this ‘neoconservative postmodernism’.
So, what is to be done? One strategy is to resist: to speak, as insistently and consistently, 'of our commitments in a way which does justice to their sublety, their passion, their ethical integrity and their belief in human agency. .... to speak the nuanced language of education, not the metallic language of the market' (Fielding, 1999). Another is to deploy irony at every opportunity, to make things look as silly as they sound: 'a few thousand 'ideas' .... in the top of an ideas funnel ....'! Yet another is to develop strategic disloyalty to the brand by reasserting the service ethic over market advantage.
The problem of language: sites for 'acts of resistance' (Bourdieu, 1998)
In this section, we point briefly to some examples of the trouble we have with words to show where the social practice of adult education needs to be linguistically reconstituted and reappropriated through resistance, subversion or treason.
Nicespeak
Nicespeak is what happens when you buy a carton of yoghurt and you are earnestly enjoined to 'Enjoy your meal' and 'Have a nice day!'. Language is used to ensure that nothing is really said. In our institutions and departments nicespeak gives us the reassuring vacuities of 'mission statements' and, worse, 'vision statements'. It smoothly proceeds to obfuscate reality through a series of deft elisions between, for example, student and learner, education and therapy, product and brand, information and presentation. This is, essentially, the soft and manipulative discourse of the market and the corporation mediated through the vocabulary of the supermarket checkout.
Nicespeak works in mysterious ways to render problems as possibilities, negatives as positives. And, of course, in using this language in the ubiquitous 'self-assessment' procedures by which we are required to police the 'quality' of what we do, we become the agents of our own self-regulation and, indeed, salvation. Thus, as Deborah Cameron (2001) shows, when 'large classes and overdependence on casualised teaching staff are compromising standards', we hear ourselves saying:
The challenge of teaching larger classes has been addressed through rolling programmes of staff development; standards are monitored through robust quality assurance procedures, in the context of an institution-wide commitment to continuous improvement.
Getting closer to the sinister Orwellian notion of 'newspeak' is the New Labour language of 'social exclusion', a highly politicised and potent version of nicespeak. Here, under the bland evasions of social exclusion - within which some of us still have to root around to find the money to fund our work - lie the competing policy discourses of poverty/redistribution (RED), the moral turpitude of the underclass (MUD) and social integration through paid work (SID) (Levitas, 1998). What is important is the power of the idea of social exclusion because, as Ruth Levitas argues,
Not only does the multiplicity of meanings which attach to it give it wide acceptance, but it operates as a shifter between the different discourses. [It] .... can, almost unnoticed, mobilize a redistributive argument behind a cultural or integrationist one – or represent cultural or integrationist arguments as redistributive.
In other words, under all the niceness, language remains an important site of struggle – and policy a linguistic and ideological minefield.
Technical rationality
We are all familiar with this, what Michael Collins (1991) calls the 'cult of efficiency':
a growing, and seductive, tendency to make more and more areas of human endeavour (the practical, moral, and political projects of everyday life) amenable to measurement and techno-bureaucratic control according to what is invoked as a scientific approach.
This is the contemporary equivalent of the language of what would once have been described as 'merely useful knowledge' in which substantive questions of value and purpose are systematically replaced by pragmatic (but, nevertheless, highly ideological) questions about efficiency and effectiveness – again, 'what works', or what the Scottish philosopher, George Davie, nicely terms 'smooth performativeness' (Davie, 1991). Here, par excellence, the vocation of adult education is transformed into the process of teaching and learning, leading to a systematic de-skilling of teachers and students alike.
What this 'tyranny of the technical' (Frowe, 2001) does is actively to reconstruct, through language, the social practice of adult education as a natural practice, an objectified reification which is somehow separate from and outside of the practitioner. Once this has been accomplished and we become its unwitting instruments, the sad work of competence, targets and 'performativity' can be left to get on with the job of destroying what our work really means and why it matters. Perhaps what is most fundamental here is the error of disaggregation (which is essentially an epistemological error), and its corollary in the idea that the whole is simply the sum of the parts. Collins' (1998) riposte is to quote John Dewey: 'solution by the method of partition is always unsatisfactory to minds with an ambition for comprehensiveness'.
Individualism and individuation
Nell Keddie in a seminal paper written in 1980, one year into the 'Thatcherite revolution', showed how mainstream adult education has always been rooted in an 'ideology of individualism'. Frank Coffield, reviewing the major ESRC research programme on the Learning Society nearly twenty years later in 1999, concludes that one of the main characteristics of the current consensus on lifelong learning is that it locates responsibility for both 'employability' and 'flexibility' at individual level. Keddie was talking about a professional and pedagogical ideology whereas Coffield is describing a political and economic rationale. The effect, however, it the same: pathology is reasserted over structure as 'public issues' are transmuted into 'personal troubles'.
In adult education this insistent 'de-socialising of the social' – which is, in effect, a form of neoliberal remoralisation – is often accomplished by means of a seductive, humanistic linguistic gloss of learner-centredness, personal development and self-empowerment. Historically, therefore, it is important to understand the links between pedagogical individuation and ideological atomisation – and, in particular, the part that the disciplining power of language has played in this process.
Marketisation and commodification
We have all become comparatively fluent in, or at any rate familiar with 'marketspeak' – the New Right's project of discursive reconstruction. The cleverness and success of this project should not be under-estimated – nor should its continuities in the era of New Labour:
.... advocates of the New Right have appropriated from the recent cultural past a lexicon of signifiers, a register of terms that resonate with traces of sociohistorical meaning.... vacuous signifiers resonating with residual meaning are used to win the support of those who otherwise might impede 'progress' .... 'excellence', 'quality', 'liberty', 'equality' .... signifiers [that] have been sutured to .... concepts that reflect the imperatives of the market (Briton, 1996).
Two discourses of citizenship dominate current adult education policy and practice. Both are fundamentally economistic in the sense that they posit at the centre of our conception of lifelong learning the idea that human beings are essentially economic animals – creatures of the cash nexus. The first discourse constructs the adult learner as worker and producer. Adult education is about showing that, in Tony Blair's famous words, 'Education is the best economic policy we have'. It is thus reduced to training for work: preparing people for their roles in production, wealth creation and profit (mainly other people's, of course). The second discourse of citizenship constructs the adult learner as consumer and customer. In this case, adult education is reduced to a demand-side commodity which may be bought and sold in the market place – just like any other commodity.
Postmodernism
It is not our purpose here to enter into a debate about the pros and cons of postmodernism (!). Clearly, however, we wish to speak in the language of a tradition of adult education (as distinct from adult learning) which sees itself as a vital, if modest, embodiment of the Enlightenment project; that is, as part of the historical struggle for more democracy, social justice and equality which continues throughout the world today. This struggle must certainly become more nuanced and sensitive to the politics of identity if it is to embrace the notion of 'solidarity in difference', but we believe that it remains the ideological and epistemological bedrock of our work.