DOCUMENT RESUME ED 410 439 CE 074 618 AUTHOR Yeo, Stephen ACCESS: "What and Whither, When and How?" Mansbridge TITLE Memorial Lecture (14th, Leeds, England, March 14, 1991). Leeds Univ. (England). Dept. of Adult and Continuing INSTITUTION Education. PUB DATE 1991-00-00 NOTE 39p. PUB TYPE Opinion Papers (120) Speeches/Meeting Papers (150) MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage. EDRS PRICE *Access to Education; *Adult Education; *Adult Learning; DESCRIPTORS Educational Demand; *Educational Discrimination; *Educational Finance; Foreign Countries; *Job Training; Nontraditional Education; Prior Learning; Vocational Education Great Britain IDENTIFIERS ABSTRACT The current discourse about access can be changed by using three adjectives: old, wide, and deep. Regarding the first, since the 1870s, when the professionalization and specialization of knowledge took off in so many fields, inequalities in education have actually increased where it matters most--who knows how much of what is available to be known. Second, the conversation must be widened beyond education. Increasingly, the discourse in Britain has widened into a cultural, historical one concerning patterns of class development. Third, access also stretches down deeply into where people, including old people, Uve and into their very selves. A dream or vision for education begins and ends with the individual. In this vision, education is market led; experience is used to make courses relevant to experience; learners replace teachers; and learners produce their own pathway or choice of courses that together make a degree or whatever aggregate it is that they want. General emancipation can drive access as a fully social movement alongside the economic imperative it undoubtedly is. Three quick benchmarks are as follows: (1) learners need access to the best; (2) the worlds of education and training must be brought together; and (3) access cannot be other than awkward and painful. Finally, access depends on (A list of 32 notes is appended.) funding. (YLB) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * * from the original document. * ******************************************************************************** PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL e of Educational Research and Improvement Of ED CATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION HAS BEEN GRANTED BY CENTER (ERIC) This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. TO T DUCATIONAL RESOURCES Points of view or opinions stated in this IN ORMATION CENTER (ERIC) ACCESS. document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy. `What and Whither, When and How?' MEMORIAL LECTURE FOURTEENTH MANSBRIDGE BY Stephen Yeo Principal, Ruskin College. Oxford EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF ADULT CONTINUING UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS 1991 2 BEST COPY AVAIL ABLE In Which I Try to Change the Conversation 1. Chair, Vice-Chancellor Elect, distinguished guests, friends, and those who have, I hope, dropped in on the off-chance. I am going to divide my lecture this evening into three parts. The first will be one in which as a social historian recently appointed Principal of Ruskin College I join in the 'access' conversation and thereby alter it. Access. There is a huge amount of excellent contemporary writing and reporting on the subject. Reports have reported, working parties have worked, recommendations flow: 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 2.2. But, but, but We are in the middle of an old, old field of ... force, an old debate. It is more than a debate, much more than a simple 'policy' question for the 1990s. It is an active struggle which we are continuing. The contest is a large one. 'What distinguishes the human animal is that it moves in a world of meaning; and these meanings are constitutive of its activities, not secondary to them. Ideas are internal to our social practices, not mere spin- offs from them." The struggle concerns who has access to social meanings where we live now. All of us, or the top twenty per cent? It is therefore a struggle over how social or how anti-social those meanings are. Another way of putting it: it is a struggle over whether more means different and, because it is more general, more universal than what we have got now, better. The struggle is about whether we really can pull down the old quality versus quantity, more means worse enclosures. The education which 'access' is about makes meanings. `What does it mean?' This is one of the most common questions in educational settings, in the seminar, the course, the classroom. The answer depends on who and how many are in a position to ask the question. Real, general accessibility. Equal opportunities. What does it all mean? Once we are all, all of us, 1 3 everyone, in a position to answer that question, the answer will of course be unrecognisably different. What does it mean? The `it' itself will have changed. The exclusion of whole categories meanings, of people from full access to what education makes explanations, reasons, theories, techniques, sciences itself changes meanings, makes society different, props up the powers that be. 'Knowledge', as Francis Bacon realised a long time ago, and then nineteenth-century working-class movements campaigned under his slogan, 'Knowledge is Power'. But that's a more complicated statement, much less of a slogan, than meets the eye. As power relations alter, so too does the constitution of knowledge itself. 'It', knowledge, like 'the state', cannot simply be captured or even extended on behalf of the majority and remain the same. Walter Benjamin rebuked the German Social Democrats for not seeing this during the interwar period. The party, he thought, failed to perceive the double meaning of their slogan 'knowledge is power'. It thought the same knowledge that secured the rule of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat would enable the proletariat to free itself from that rule relating to the humanities.' ... This was especially true of knowledge and I am talking about content here not More of the same is not necessarily desirable. It could be even more `delivery' oppressive. In the Muslim world, for instance, there is now an increasing popular hostility towards a Western science and technology seemingly far removed from serving social and human needs, but dedicated instead towards supporting the hideous rationality of power within a violent and unjust world.' Such hostility came through from the Women's Movement during the 1970s and early 1980s in the work, for instance, of Christa Wolf. It now comes from environmentalists with the possibility of a new discipline or disciplines which criss-cross human sciences, geography, and economics. And it comes from students who vote with their application forms, away from science subjects. There are very complex issues here concerning the relations between social position - class, race and gender - social power and science or knowledge. Power is 2 knowledge. Property rights increasingly include intellectual property. `Knowledge is Power' is also, of course, quite a simple statement, simple enough to have been appropriated by Power Gen in their recent privatisation advertising campaign. As some of the six million people in Britain who are less than functionally literate have learned to say during the last fifteen years, the connection between knowledge (and therefore education) and social relations makes education very material and quite ordinary in the dictionary sense of that word. Its absence makes for exclusion, exclusivity of a very basic kind in a society which is full of, even ruled by, meanings. A fine writer in QueenSpark Books in Brighton and the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, Margaret Bearfield, once put it this way: It's a strange thing to say, but I think somewhere inside me there is an educated woman ... If you're educated you don't have to fumble in the dark like I do. People are all the same basically. We have the same emotions, we all want a better life, we all want to be happy. Education doesn't really come into it in that respect. But education has a powerful impact and people who have had a low education tend to withdraw into themselves. They hold back. They don't trust people who are high-class. If I could spell well, my writing would be richer. I get frustrated always looking in dictionaries or at the daily newspaper to spell certain words. I know what I want to say, so I give up and say, `Oh, I'll just put that one down instead.' I'm stopped for lack of education. Ordinary, in Chambers Dictionary: 'according to the common Of common rank'. order ... Everybody's business. At this point, I want to quote from an essay which changed the conversation for me a long time ago. It was first published by Raymond Williams in 1958 in a book called Conviction. He called the essay 'Culture is Ordinary', but it was to a considerable extent about education. By happy chance it was republished in The Guardian on the morning of my interview 3 for the job of Principal at Ruskin. I used it then and I will use it now: We should recognise that education is ordinary: that it is, before everything else, the process of giving to ordinary members of society its full common meanings, and the skills that will enable them to amend these meanings, in the light of their personal and common experience. If we start from that we can get rid of the remaining restrictions, and make the necessary changes. I do not mean only money restrictions, though these, of course, are ridiculous and must go. I mean also restrictions in the mind: the insistence, for example, that there is a hard maximum number - a fraction of the population as a whole - capable of really profiting by a university education, or a grammar school education, or by any full course I cannot accept that education is a training for jobs, or of liberal studies ... for making useful citizens (that is, fitting into this system). It is a society's confirmation of its common meanings, and of the human skills for their amendment. Jobs follow from this confirmation: the purpose, and then the working skills. We are moving into an economy where we shall need many more highly trained specialists. For this precise reason, I ask for a common education, that will give our society its cohesion, and prevent it disintegrating into a series of specialist departments, the nation become a firm.' This is a different conversation from the 1.1s, 1.2s, 1.3s, I have been reading in the Access literature recently. It is social and moral, unlike the discourse of the politicians who, keen on cheap multiplication and fond of long (social) division, now try to exile social and moral considerations altogether. There is a hard, unattractive impatience about so much of the Access debate. Charles Dickens took great trouble to set the last of his Christmas Books, a story called 'The Battle of Life: A Love Story', in a place which had long ago been a battlefield. The story happens in 'one little orchard attached to an old stone house with a honeysuckle porch, where, on a bright autumn morning, there were sounds of music and laughter'. It is - or it seems to be - an innocent, accessible tale. But Dickens was concerned to set it where 'once upon a time, it matters little when, and in stalwart England... a fierce battle was fought' Crops were sown and grew up and were gathered in... Sabbath bells rang peacefully; old people lived and died... But there were deep green patches 4 in the growing corn... that people looked at awfully. Year after year they reappeared and it was known that underneath those fertile spots heaps of men and bones lay buried indiscriminately, enriching the ground. The husbandmen who ploughed those places shrank from the great worms abounding there. As an historian of working-class associations in general and of the co-operative movement in particular, I was greatly honoured to be invited to give this 1991 Albert Mansbridge Memorial Lecture. I will return to Mansbridge. When I accepted the Trustees' invitation, I was thinking about Access while reading other things. I immediately wanted to talk about it, in this setting, using three adjectives: old, wide and deep. It is with these adjectives that I now want to try to inflect the current conversation concerning access. We are in the middle of a field of force much older than any of us in the 1990s, where there are deep and still growing patches of inequality. 1870s, when the the Since professionalisation and specialisation of knowledge (science) took off in so many fields, it is arguable that inequalities in education have actually increased where it matters most, namely in who (how many?) know how much of what is available to be known. The boundaries which define 'educated people' are constantly being shifted in order to leave most people outside them.' This has led to new class alignments, even more powerful in their effect than the ones based on the ownership of property in the fixed asset sense which socialists have long addressed. There is a sense in which the private ownership or enclosure of know-how, expertise, has become a more powerful determinant of twentieth-century societies than patterns of ownership of a more conventional kind. Such privacy surrounds and divides us. Our rulers are now trying to say that there is only one kind of knowledge and it and it has become an 'it' - has been enclosed by an elite web of individuals or of nations. History, they tell us, has ended where we (some of us) are now. 5 LI In the years since his death, the work of Raymond Williams has kept returning to me. How much we need him in this kind of conversation. Williams was very interested in mental and manual divisions of labour at the core of knowledge itself, in the history of such divisions and their present negative effects. I will quote from him again, this time from The Country and the City. Like John Ruskin, the inspiration of the two American founders of Ruskin College, Williams deplored the division of labour as the division of humans rather than the division of work. The negative effects will continue to show themselves, in a powerful and apparently irresistible pressure: physical effects on the environment; a simultaneous crisis of overcrowded cities and a depopulating countryside, not only within but between nations; physical and nervous stresses of certain characteristic kinds of work and characteristic kinds of career; the widening gap between the rich and poor of the world, within the threatening crisis of population and resources; the similarly widening gap between concern and decision, in a world in which all the fallout, military, technical and social, is in the end inescapable. And to see the negative effects, with whatever urgency, can be to paralyse the If we look at the `educated'/` uneducated' dichotomy since the 1870s when education was supposedly made more accessible, it has, curiously enough, been more common in the language than before. It is as though new openings - new points of access - have been made in order to reinforce old closures. There are profound geographical and social - anti-social - divisions of labour in our society. They support inequalities of an obvious kind, material inequalities, but also less obvious inequalities, for instance of educational demand, expectation and desire. 'Who do you think you are?', is asked of Ruskin students, for instance, when they go home. It is asked with some anger, to say the least. Struggles over identity can be very violent. Without a great deal of strength they can lead all too easily into a kind of retreat: 'I am, most appropriately, the person who I was and in the situation where I was, before I came to Ruskin'. The last recess of the division of labour is this recess within ourselves, where what we want and what we believe we can do seem impassably divided.' 6 That recess - recess not access and very difficult to access - is a deliberate achievement of our present social system, particularly of our means of communication. British inequalities reappear year after year. If they are seen in too recent a perspective, without the long history behind them, they can all too easily be ratified by 'what people want', or appear to want, which may be translated as what people are in a position to demand. By how many modern meanings do most of us feel included? Of what proportion of modern meanings are we able to ask: `what does it mean?'. Contemporary relations of power, deep inequalities, can easily be reinforced by too thin a conversation concerning access - too new, too narrow and too shallow a conversation. Fertile spots there are, yes. Real advances are being made in the Access world. It is some of the most hopeful work in all of education at the moment. But some of the protagonists in the middle of our contemporary debates, some of the husbandmen shrinking perhaps from great worms, some of the Access experts I have met during the eighteen months since I became Principal of Ruskin College, seem to think that it is all very new and all very national (what Britain needs) and very individual. The national and the individual seem to go together in conservative ideology at the moment. Access is sometimes presented as though it has roots no deeper than initiatives such as the admirable CNAA/CVCP Access Courses Recognition Group kite-marking programme. One version of the history carries it no further back than 1978 when the Department of Education and Science invited several LEAs to provide new courses for adults as part of a pilot scheme. There are more than a thousand such courses now with twenty thousand students on them. Excellent. But in this way of telling the story, a movement, which is without any doubt the right way to think of access to education, whether higher or not, gets collapsed into a set of courses. In this way a silent social revolution becomes an inaudible, sensible way of buying places the nation needs. A self-created, collective like the ones with which Albert movement from below 7 Mansbridge was so closely associated - designed to transform a whole social system through moments of social opportunity, turns into a provided, individual response from above, designed to rescue the same social system in a moment of 'national' need. Access, whether with a capital A or not, stretches back a long way in time, when fierce battles have been fought by people acting for themselves, not as proponents of national policy. Where impulses come from, and where they are known to have to come from by people moving forward with them, matters a great deal in relation to where, in the end, they are going. For the first twenty years of their work it was illegal for the Rochdale Pioneers to set aside funds for educational purposes. They did it nonetheless. Young Oxford: a monthly magazine devoted to the Ruskin Hall Movement [WA, no.1, 1899] challenged Oxford as well as seeking entry to it. 'The difficulties... of acquiring knowledge in letters without pecuniary means' which Thomas Hardy explored in Jude the Obscure (1899) were thought by some readers, he wrote in a 1912 postscript to that novel, to be 'an attack on venerable institutions'. They were. The Ruskin 'sociology' strike of 1909 was carried on in pamphlets with urgent titles like 'The Burning Question of Education'.' Increased funding for the WEA as an approved body in 1919-20 was discussed at Cabinet level against the perceived threat of the Labour College Movement.' Corresponding Societies, Mutual Improvement Societies, Adult Schools, educational and extension associations of all kinds, have not been neutral affairs working on consensual objectives. They have been sites of conflict, accessing knowledge in the name of different, voluntary, elective impulses and ideals. Charles Shaw, a potter, published his When I was a Child in 1893, just after the improvements in access to education which went with the 1870 Act were made mandatory on local authorities. His memories of before and after were concerned 8 0