It is an honour for me to be asked to speak at your 50th celebrations, especially since I know that Glasgow’s Department is one of those which are keeping the flag flying in adult education, of the sort I first knew. I feel a little superior today because it is 55 years this month since I had my first appointment in adult education so I can beat you on that.
I want to recall, first, what it was like to start in adult education just after the war. Remember that famous line of Wordsworth, that bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. It wasn’t quite like that, but it was a very good period for those of us who came out of military service at that time. Quite a number of us decided to go for this kind of work, I need mention only two famous figures – Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams. It’s interesting that the fine early books they each wrote both came out of adult education teaching: The Making of the English Working Class and Culture and Society.
It was a curious period, there was the Attlee government, which was encouraging to us. There was the start of the National Health Service. From the Butler Act we had great hopes. More: the country was recognising adult education in a way it hadn’t done before, especially university adult education. There was a spat between Churchill and Florence Horseburgh, who was Minister of Education in the next Conservative government and tried to cut adult education. Churchill was approached, and produced a wonderful sentence on the lines: “never in the history of this island has there been a more worthwhile cause”. In short, he said “Stop it Horseburgh, give them the money”. So, that was a great moment for us.
We remember then what we call the ‘Great Tradition’ in adult education and the dominant figures in that were Archbishop Temple, and the famous conference at Oxford; Tawney; ( I may be the only person in this room to have seen Tawney in the flesh). He was a wonderful man. He headed the WEA for many years. Then Albert Mansbridge who founded the WEA. There are others, naturally; and the baton went later to Titmuss, the great writer on the Social Services.
We admired those people, almost this side idolatry. We felt we were part of a sort of crusade, centred on the correct conviction that many people, far too many people in this country, in Britain, lacked the kind of education they could benefit from, and wanted it for the best reasons. They would be the focus and centre of our work. We were fond of phrases such as "the intelligent lay man" and one invented by Arthur Koestler, who spoke of "the anxious corporals", who could be recognised because their battle dress always bulged at the back of their trousers, because they had a Pelican paperback stuffed in it.
What we did not think about - in fact we tended to think ill of it - was adult education for vocational purposes; almost anathema to us was the idea of certification within liberal adult education. You did it for the love of God or the relief of man’s estate. We went into the work with very great hopes but often found that what people thought we were going to do was give them socialist literature – George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – but though we might be of the Left politically, we did not intend to introduce books labelled of the Left. In so far as we were Literature tutors we thought that nothing but the best was good enough for our students, we gave them Shakespeare and great authors. One test of the way we were, I discovered, was that if they became interested in Shakespeare - not talked down to about but personally interested in Shakespeare at its height - then the classes went shorter distances each week so that it gradually took about one term to reach Act 3 of King Lear. That was a sort of success because you were introducing them to Literature and what it could mean. I remember a little phrase which was that “the point of adult education is to get across without selling out”, I would still stand by that.
Very briefly, the above was the sort of world we lived in. We went out 4 or 5 nights a week and then, if we were well thought of, did many Weekend Schools. In fact, after about 10 years of doing this our wives might say: "The children don't see enough of you. Why not try a job which doesn't take you away so much?".
How do our society look today, 50 years on? Obviously, we are much more prosperous, and in many other ways things have improved: housing is better; food can be better if we make it so. Education and the National Health Service have had a lot more spent on them. Those gains have to be qualified even though the facts and figures are remarkable. How do we qualify then? We must recognise more than we are doing at present that there is an underclass of about 10-15% who really are in a poorer way than we were in the Leeds working class before the war.
The body of working class people were not then a uniform group, they were mixed – they hadn’t been filtered out. There were some very bright ones, some that should have gone out and upwards socially but didn’t, some not so bright, some in work, some out of work, there were some talented in other ways. Those districts could rightly be called communities or cultures of their own.
Nowadays the underclass have been filtered out, partly by education but also by other opportunities as industry and commerce have changed. Good? Yes, to some extent. But those left in the poorest areas - it is not adequate to call them working-class now - they should be called, even though people hate the word, the ‘underclass’. My own district in Leeds had about 30,000 inhabitants. One grammar school took about thirty aspirants a year, that was filtering if you like, of the race horses. That place, when I last saw it a few years ago, has 15,000 living there. Forty percent are on relief, forty percent are one-parent families, mainly women. Some people there or in other areas are doing their best to improve matters. But it is not too harsh to call them ‘sinks’. Most of those who have, as we used to say, "something about them" have got out; the others for various reasons couldn’t get out. This is a deeply depressing because it is then easy to move into a cycle of deprivation, with drugs and the rest of it. Perhaps I have rather overstressed that but we should feel more strongly about it; more directly about the underclass than we do.
What about the National Health Service? It is in many ways a disgrace; and in many ways it is magnificent. I have greatly benefited from it as have millions of others. But the disgrace about it - which nobody in this government has firmly addressed - is that it is two-tier, that you get what you pay for. When people tell you that they "went private" and did this with a good conscience because it took the pressure off the waiting list, that is an illogicality. It doesn’t take the pressure off the waiting list – it delays opportunities for those who can’t pay. The two-tier National Health Service is something we must address.
Education is at least two-tier also and becoming more so in certain respects, certainly in England, so much so that now in a district such as Richmond-on-Thames there’s a new breed of free-lance tutors teaching middle-class children so that they may get into those selective grammar schools which still survive or those state schools which use some of the grammar schools’ methods. So, in-fact, we are by-passing the problems of Comprehensives, making it harder for them to succeed, work because the system is once again becoming or remaining two-tier. What we are ensuring is a more divided society. To be divided does not mean to be varied, or diverse; those may be interesting conditions. To be divided, split, means that some have many opportunities and others few.
Behind all this is a major shift; to do with the sense of social place. We are told constantly - George Orwell was told almost 70 years ago that he complained too much about class in Britain - that we’re becoming classless. That was apropos The Road to Wigan Pier. I was told it with The Uses of Literacy 40 years ago. People of that type will tell you that they are the best of friends with their char women, except that they call them "cleaning" ladies these days. The best way I can think of approaching today's changes is to suggest that we are losing some of our old sense of class but its place is being taken by a sense of status, stratification and division chiefly by occupation. The meritocracy is at the top, the underclass at the bottom and the great body of people in between. So that, again, we are divisive. If you think of status in this sense, as a matter of profession and other forms of stratification you would have about 10-15 percent who are the meritocrats, the successful lucky ones, about 10-15 percent in the underclass and the great body in the middle who make up "the mass audiences", the ones at whom the advertisers primarily direct themselves and the PR people and ITV.
What this of course is predicated on is the knowledge that this is now a secular society, but one of consumers, dedicated to commodities; whether we are consuming goods or ideas – well, not ideas so much as opinions; ideas are more intractable than opinions; opinions are easier and cheaper. What comes about then, in a society like this which is also prosperous - there are many more people worth the wooing - is a populist society; and that becomes a relativist society, in that it will not accept judgements between things or opinions, because that divides the customers – the consumers. You have a levelling society; you have a head-counting society. I wrote to the DG of the BBC, saying: “Your advertising men made a disgraceful set of adverts about Lady Chatterley’s Lover. They made it appear to be nudge-nudge, joke-joke, book with lots of bonking. But the book is better than that and you shouldn’t distort it.” He replied: “I do understand, but 'x' million people watched it”. So where are we? This is just a non-argument. Numbers justify against all other considerations. .
It is a society in which we are all assumed to be equal before the cash registers, in which there is no need to worry about individual or personal convictions. So, it is a society which has profound implications for adult education. Look if you will at just two items which I have already mentioned but now in a little more detail – Education and Broadcasting. About 15% of this country are functionally illiterate – that is about 1 in 7. What does functionally illiterate mean? It certainly means that they cannot pass the level of literacy required to pass GCSE. It means, in fact, that they cannot really decipher a bus timetable. Bus timetables can be sometimes rather difficult to read but we should be able to expect that capacity in virtually everyone. The point is though that that 15% and some of the others who just get by are not literate enough for a democracy's needs. They are only literate enough to be conned by people who want to sell them everything from cereals to notions. They’re the victims of what we might call the ‘stay as sweet as you are society’ where you are implicitly asked: "Don’t for heaven’s sake have aspirations and don’t break out of the gang because we’ve got to sell you things".
We are seeing some extraordinary effects. Two years ago, in a GCSE board of people considering what to put in the English Literature paper, it was heavily argued that there was no place for Shakespeare on the curriculum because - you know what the fashionable word is, don’t you? - Shakespeare was not relevant. If ever there was a misuse of the word, that is one. It was argued that no books earlier than 1900 should be on the lists. One remembers Othello, and the base Indian throwing a pearl away.
The BBC again. If you tell them they are "dumbing down", they react with horror. They never meant to do that. And they say: "We have Attenborough after all, swimming away there. Or Simon Schama or…. and we do many such good things". Of course they do all that, and feel we will thereby be diverted from criticising such programmes as The Weakest Link. A friend of mine who was a refugee from Nazi Germany ended his career as one of the top executives in the BBC. He rang me in shock after watching The Weakest Link and said: "This is the first truly fascist programme I have seen on the BBC. So much for Public Service broadcasting".
This is the division again: put in any sort of nonsense you like for the bulk of people and buy off the meritocrats by putting on one of those "quality" programmes I mentioned above. Whatever happens don’t, for heaven’s sake, criticise. One then remembers Maupassant's story Boule de Suif, with the elegant ladies in the coach which was stopped by the German troops during the 1870 war – worried about whether they would be robbed and raped. Luckily there was a prostitute in the carriage whom they had scorned. But now they said to her: “You go and give them your favours, and that will let us off”. She does, and they revert to ignoring her.
Now, what should be the response of "adult education" to these current pressures towards populist relativism? We should remember first the old historical sense: that it is for the love of God and the relief of man's estate. And no certificates. Vocational education has a different role. I do not think that we will have much help from the government. Mr.Blair talks about the rise of the meritocrats as though this is a new insight. Has he realised that Michael Young’s book The Rise of the Meritocracy is a satire against meritocracy?
The concentration on vocational, certificated education is now dominant not only in extramural thinking but in the universities as a whole. I know of weighty critics of this in Britain. The best such critic I know – he died not long ago - was Irving Howe in America; he wrote a very fine study of the state of American universities and said that the universities will stand for nothing if they do not "bear witness" about conditions of all kinds outside their walls. What he meant was that universities are more than technological or scientific institutions; they are places in which in almost Matthew Arnoldian sense they consider the true, the good, and the beautiful and try to make judgements about the nature of our lives, our relationships and society in general, especially in a democracy.
When there was a body called the Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education - which the last Tory Government let die as quickly as it could – it made, at what proved to be the end of its life, a large survey of the demand for adult education in Britain and, in particular, for the reasons why it was wanted. The results were astonishing. Very many people wanted adult education; even more surprising was the fact that the majority, when they were asked why, said they wanted that kind of education for all sorts of lovely old-fashioned reasons such as: “I would like to understand life better” and “ I would like to understand society better” and “I would like to understand myself better”. They had no certification or vocational impulse. They had something of the old Tawney, Mansbridge, Temple, Titmus, Thompson, Williams aims.
So what we need, even the 75% of us who are officially literate but within whom the majority are only just literate - literate at a level at which they can be deceived - we have to go a stage further – is to demand critical literacy. Because in some ways it is harder to live in a democracy than in a totalitarian state because although apparently there is nothing demanded of you, much is all the time pushed towards you by the ubiquitous persuaders. So, if you do not learn how to say “come off it” or “stuff that for a lark”. Or “bugger off” or something like that you will be conned, deceived. There is plenty of evidence of this. Have you any idea – most of you – how loan sharks operate to get money out of people who are poor anyway? It is a dreadful story and is increasing. But then in some ways we are a glib society and cheating society in many respects. That is one of the results of insufficiently corralled capitalism; feeding on almost universal instincts.
What we all need more than anything else is not simple literacy but critical literacy and that should start in schools. How to blow the gaff. Then there is an even further aim, which is much more difficult. We need to encourage imaginative literacy. Which is a society in which we know that King Lear matters more than the works of Jeffrey Archer. That is easy to say but hard to arrive at; remember the sales of Mr.Archer? So, greater Critical and greater Imaginative Literacy; those are the models before us and these the main targets of adult education – non-certificated, non-vocational, love of God education. Critical literacy, improved on by imaginative literacy. Great literature figures largely here, but you can introduce almost anything imaginatively, except perhaps Accountancy. Though, come to think of it … even that would be worth trying. I had a problem with a surveyor when we moved house; there was an extraordinary exchange of letters because we did not speak the same language. He was used to a world of protective, big-bow, semi-technical jargon. At first, that was a dialogue of the deaf but we broke through into daylight after about five exchanges.
For whom and to whom, then, should we try to speak? There is, of course, a special case for directly trying to help the worse-off, that needs many more special teams. Yet the most important truth about adult education in the 21st century is that now, if it means anything at all, it should apply to all parts of society, not only to the "anxious Corporals", and “intelligent lay people”. We must do everything we can to serve them when they come to us. But virtually the whole of society is being incessantly offered trivial values, or the rejection of any value-judgements. The job of adult education is now both wider and deeper even than it was in the 1950s.; because we do not know now what we are missing and how comprehensively we are being deceived. What can you say of a democratic society which, in the last decade in the 19th. century was able to declare that it was the first nation on earth to be fully literate, what can you say when that society, at the turn into the 21st century, has as its best selling newspapers such as the Sun and the News of the World. They will tell you that that’s what people want. But how can they know what they could want if they are only given such limited perspectives?.
Last night it was reported that the Heads of ITV are going to put some very firm conditions into ITN now: “We are not going to have all this heavy stuff , we are going to have it lighter – it's what people want.” It is, again, more the duty of broadcasters in the public service to give people what they don’t know they want and what they need for society to mature itself, not to be mired in low-level tastes. That means that you should not start the news by saying that a famous football manager has had a heart attack. We may be very sorry to hear that, but not as the first item of national, even international, news. The BBC has by now much the same bad habit. The ITV executives above were implying that what is "the news" should be largely decided by what people already think and believe and know; whereas the essence of a civil education is that it shows that you do not know what you can like and what you can enjoy and judge well, until you have been introduced to it. As E. M. Forster reminded us: “How do I know what I like until I see what it is possible to have?”.
The beauty of British Broadcasting when it has followed its Public Service remit is that it has tempted people beyond the boundaries they knew, until they discovered that they liked what they saw. That is not high-brow'ism; you can have high quality in popular work as much as in "high-brow" work. You can have second rate but pretentious low-level work, as you can have pretentious high-level work. This is not to say they are all equal. It is not to say that Monty Python is as imaginatively impressive as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Or the Beatles are as good as Mozart. Both in each pair have they proper place and worth. But that should not lead to a value-free levelling, where some say “We’re Catholic and hospitable; we make no distinctions”. There is a point at where that attitude becomes porous, since you are simply saying that everything is equally worthwhile. The best of broadcasting in Britain - which has been a great success but is now declining - has given its audiences new levels of wit and perception, as in Monty Python and many another, which you do not find anywhere else. And interesting point about these is that a class survey of the audiences showed that they were by social class pretty evenly distributed; as many "working men" as dukes were watching and enjoying the show.
So, in all this, I’m saying that adult education’s job today in and from the universities is not only bigger but deeper. That is required by the kind of society towards which we are rapidly moving.
There are two mottos which I often quote because they are still immensely worthwhile. One of them is from the German Philosopher, Lessen; he said: “We must not accept the wantlessness of the poor”. What he meant, I think, was that we must not accept that people in poverty should remain there, hopelessly. But the statement can be broadened to mean that we must not accept the imaginative wantlessness, the intellectual wantlessness, which can beset the poor; and so can apply to those in the underclass today.
The other sentence is at least as important as Lessing's. Bishop Wilson uttered it in the early 19th. century. It seems to me to apply exactly to our society: “The number of those who need to be awakened is far greater than that of those who need comfort”. In the 50s, when my generation started in adult education, the people who came to us were often those who, in Bishop Wilson’s words, needed comfort; they knew something was wrong, they wanted to improve things. But they were a small body. As Bishop Wilson pointed out, the number of those who needed to be awakened was much greater than that of those who knew their condition.. It still is. I would like to offer the Adult Education Department those two mottos, but especially the second one, for our move into the 21st century.
Well, thanks very much, Richard Hoggart. I like to hope we can all have a vote of thanks to Richard for saying some deeply unfashionable things tonight. Many of which I agreed with – some of which I didn’t agree with. I think it’s the voice of what Richard has done over the 40 years since the publications of The Uses of Literacy that has actually, in many senses, changed the world that we live in and not only for his defence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover which in fact created a new way of thinking about literature. But also the deeply working class voice that he brought to education and to educational matters. And that seemed to me to represent something which did go much deeper and that’s the clarity and the common voice and the dissenting working class which actually was from a very deep tradition and went very very deeply and was one of the last times that people had tried to conceive of the future in terms of a new order and in some ways we feel very far away from that. But at the same time it seems to me there are ways of trying to re-think the future and I think in Richard’s injunction for adult education to make it’s priority critical literacy and imaginable literacy I think we have two of the planks in which we can project the future activities. Thank you very much.