A second chance
Posted on 04/12/2024
In editing Forum’s Autumn number, Professor John Holford ignores our strapline’s 3 to 19 age-limit to explore issues of adult education. He needs no justification, says Patrick Yarker. Comprehensive education is a lifelong endeavour.
In an article probably published in the liberal Westminster Gazette in August 1916, a sergeant in a Manchester regiment describes going over the top on the first day of the battle of the Somme. Advancing in No Man’s Land he is shot through the chest. Conscious, he lies among the dead for more than a day, is shot a second time, and at long last brought to safety. Almost everyone who went up the ladders with him thirty hours before to doubled through the gaps in the wire has been killed. More intense even than the pain of his wounds, the article describes this soldier’s fear of being left on the battlefield: ‘A man badly knocked out feels as though the world had spun him off into a desert of unpeopled space. Combined with pain and helplessness, the sense of abandonment goes near to break his heart.’ [i]
The article ends with a line from the Song of Roland quoted in the original Old French: Ço dit la Geste e cil ki el camp fut. In English: ‘So says the chronicle, and he who was present at the battle.’ The poem goes on: ‘[W]ho does not know these things understands little of this story.’[ii]
The writer who expected his readers to know these things was 35 years old in 1916, a graduate of Balliol, a historian of the C16th, a teacher for the Workers Education Association and a member of the Independent Labour Party. His political beliefs prevented his accepting an officer’s commission; he served in the ranks. After the Armistice he became a Fellow at his old college, lectured at the LSE, and joined the Labour Party. Richard Henry Tawney’s writings would significantly influence the development of Labour’s policies, and in particular its policy for adult education.
Comprehensive education is predicated on the hope of human educability. It takes its stand convinced that anyone can learn, and that no genetic determinant, nor any given social context, necessarily limits the capacity or ability to learn, or the extent of what can be learned. So it opposes, and supersedes, all versions of formal education configured as readying people for the job-market and as labour power: education for the needs of capital.
Instead, the comprehensive ideal seeks to create an education worthy of humankind’s best nature. It recognises the intrinsic good for any individual and for society in that process of education which, in Democracy and Education, John Dewey called ‘a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating…[and which] is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself.’ This good is a common good, irreducible to commodification.
Education so conceived cannot be confined to the period of formal schooling. In its light, as Professor John Holford outlines in his Editorial for the Autumn number, the Labour Party developed across much of the C20th a valuable framework of adult education. Commitment to working class solidarity and a conception of socialism as the common good doubtless convinced many in the Party that education is about ‘the whole person as a social being’, in John Holford’s words, and essential to support individual growth, to strengthen communities and organisations, and to bring democracy to fruition.
At a high point of progress towards a fully comprehensive education system in England, Robin Pedley, one of the three founders of Forum, lectured and published on the comprehensive university. He confronted the ideology of ‘academic selection’ in perhaps its strongest redoubt, challenging the institutional autonomy of the university sector and the legitimacy of formal education’s academic/vocational divide after compulsory schooling.
As John Holford goes on to note, the decades since that high point of progress in the late 1960s and early 1970s have seen a wrecking-ball knock down the adult education framework. Pessimism about human educability, or a reactionary bent on the part of the powerful to ensure—as a civil servant put it in the mid-1980s—that people are educated once again to know their place, revived the pinched view of education as in the main being fitted for paid work. The ‘employability’ agenda smothered the richer and more humanly-commensurate understanding of education and its purposes, education ‘generous and humane’ as Tawney put it. Lying in the mud on the bloodiest day in British Army history, his life in the balance midway through his allotted three score years and ten—Tawney was a convinced Christian—he must have reckoned with the full meaning of the phrase ‘a second chance’, and with what it takes to make such chances possible.
The Autumn number is entitled ‘Reconstructing adult education for the common good’. It boldly steps beyond the 3 to 19 age-limit which the journal’s strapline imposes, to consider how the comprehensive ideal informed pioneering work at Fircroft Adult Education College in Birmingham, at the Workers’ Educational Association, in trade union education, and further and higher education institutions. Contributors explore what ‘the common good’ might mean, and how commitment to it animates lifelong learning, social justice and the making of citizens. Their writing emphasises the value of the experience of working-class students as a basis for formal education. It testifies to the way in which the chance to re-enter formal education as an adult—the second chance—changes lives for the better. For the common good.
[i] http://leoklein.com/itp/somme/texts/tawney_1916.html
[ii] Translated by Jessie Crossman, In Parentheses publications, Ontario, Canada, p42, section 155, l.2095, l.2098. https://www.yorku.ca/inpar/roland_crosland.pdf