The following article was originally an assignment I wrote for my degree course at the YMCA George Williams College. Today it was published in ‘Contexts, Occasional Paper, Volume 2’ an annual collection of writings by students at the college. Aside from magazine articles, this is my first book publication (to be followed later this year by ‘Journeying Together’) and I went up to London for the launch as part of the College Open Day.

The purpose of the piece was to examine a statement made by Basil Yeaxlee in 1929 about Adult Education and to look at how relevant it is today. It’s not perfect and I would like to rewrite certain sections, but I hope you have time to read it through!

Lifelong Education: Eighty years on

Much adult education will never know itself as such,… It will go on in clubs, churches, cinemas, theatres, concert rooms, trade unions, political societies, and in the homes of the people where there are books, newspapers, music, wireless sets, workshops, gardens and groups of friends. (Yeaxlee 1929: 155)

So wrote Basil Yeaxlee in his path-breaking exploration of lifelong education. Eighty years on, do his words still hold meaning and articulate the essence of adult education, or do they require changing to make them useful? To effectively answer these questions, this article will study the relevance of Yeaxlee’s statement in light of the developments in the field of adult education.

Although the majority of Yeaxlee’s statement focuses on the setting of adult education, that is, the places where it occurs, in order to understand and critique what he is describing we first need to identify what he means by the term ‘adult education’. Initially the phrase seems pretty self-explanatory as both words are familiar within the English language, yet it quickly becomes clear that ‘adult education’ can be rather difficult to define as there are many interpretations and uses of the term that imply different emphases within the educational field.

As a youth worker, I am accustomed to referring to anyone over the age of eighteen as an adult because this is the legal age of responsibility in the UK. However it is possible to get married and have children before that age and many would argue that these two activities carry more ‘adult’ responsibilities than those available at eighteen, for example, voting or purchasing alcohol and cigarettes. We can also note that other countries and cultures have different ideas about when an individual becomes an adult. Indeed many of these traditions are currently in a state of flux due to ‘simultaneous changes in technology, economics, culture, politics, demographics, the environment, and education’ (Lloyd 2005:17). This evidence suggests that ‘adulthood’ is more than just an age-related status.

The idea of ‘adult’ is not, therefore, connected to age, but is related to what generally happens as we grow older… Adulthood may thus be considered as a state of being that both accords rights to individuals and simultaneously confers duties or responsibilities upon them. (Tight 2002:15)

According to Tight, being an adult is more about a combination of responsibilities and individual rights rather than a particular age or ‘stage’ in life. Patterson also agrees with this definition and describes the term adult as ‘an ethical status resting on the presumption of various moral and personal qualities’ (Paterson 1979:31).

Although these definitions gives us a better understanding of what Yeaxlee meant by ‘adult’ in his statement, I can’t help but think that the definition is too complex and exclusive to fully embrace the concept of what he and others envisioned adult education to be. Eduard Lindeman in an influential exploration that Yeaxlee was to draw upon argued that, ‘Adult education more accurately defined begins where vocational education leaves off. Its purpose is to put meaning into the whole of life’ (Lindeman 1926:5). Lindeman believed:

The whole of life is learning, therefore education can have no endings. This new venture is called adult education not because it is confined to adults but because adulthood, maturity, defines its limits…

However, using the terms ‘adulthood’ and adult was and remains problematic. The vagueness of the notions and their capacity to be used to serve very different political ends has opens them up to considerable critique (YMCA 2007:5).

I once worked with a centre-based youth club attached to a local school. The worker-in-charge shared his office with the adult education department who were wholly concerned with running evening classes in the school for adults in the community. All the classes were geared towards gaining grades and qualifications with no obvious concern for giving ‘meaning to the whole of life’ or even learning for simple enjoyment. My observation was that they wanted to bring the enrolled adults up to a certain standard or skill set. This example of formal and institutional adult education seems to be very different to the concept proposed by Yeaxlee and his contemporaries summarised here:

First, lifelong education is seen as building upon and affecting all existing educational providers… Second, it extends beyond the formal educational providers to encompass all agencies, groups and individuals involved in any kind of learning activity… Third, it rests on the belief that individuals are, or can become, self-directing, and that they will see the value in engaging in lifelong education. (Tight 2002: 40-41)

It has been noted that ‘there has been a tendency to substitute the term adult learning for adult education in a lot of the literature’ (Courtney 1979:19) and ‘there has been a shift in much of the literature and policy discussions from lifelong education to lifelong learning’ (YMCA 2007:5). Indeed, Yeaxlee himself uses the term ‘adult education’ (Yeaxlee 1929:155) to describe non-formal learning within the wider context of a book entitled Lifelong Education! Therefore, the first thing we must do in rewriting Yeaxlee’s quote is to replace the term ‘adult education’ with ‘lifelong learning’. As we have seen it can be difficult to define who is or isn’t an adult, while the word ‘education’ often implies a more formal institutional approach to learning. ‘Lifelong’ is a more inclusive term that can involve everyone whether old or young, while ‘learning’ is a much less threatening and far more personal experience.

Yeaxlee also states that much adult education (we can here substitute the term lifelong learning) will never know itself as such. But the question remains: does lifelong learning recognise itself as learning and is this important? Certainly there are times when learning is deliberate and recognised as when ‘the adults concerned are seeking to acquire knowledge and skills’ (Brookfield 1983:15) such as the adult education class described above, however we can recognise examples from our practice where learning has occurred incidentally, and facilitated an unconscious change in behaviour and attitude.

I remember taking a group on a High Ropes course where part of the challenge was to make a leap of faith off a high platform onto a trapeze hanging about 3 feet away. The group were hard work and a young man called Sam was the worst for teasing and laughing at those who found the task difficult. It wasn’t until he tried to do it himself that he realised quite how scary it was. When he got to the top, he stopped and looked pretty shaky and we then spent about 10 minutes trying to encourage him to go for it. When he finally did it and got back down, he actually apologised to the others he’d made fun of!

In this example the change in Sam’s attitude was not from any particular ‘lesson’ or teaching, but from an experience that challenged his thinking. ‘The resource of highest value in adult education is the learner’s experience… all genuine education will keep doing and thinking together’ (Lindeman 1926:6-7). To this day Sam does not recognize his experience as learning although he has applied the lesson to his life as ‘concrete experience’ (Kolb 1984:21) and actually now encourages others when taking part in similar activities. Although this example focuses on internal change, learning is ‘a process by which behaviour changes as a result of experience’ (Maples and Webster 1980, quoted in Merriam and Caffarella 1991:124).

This style of experiential learning (Brookfield 1983:16) is in direct contrast to education where information is to be memorised and then regurgitated on demand. The concept of ‘banking education’ (Freire 1972:46) describes the attitude of educators who aim to deposit sections of ready-made knowledge into learners. The problem with this approach is that the knowledge is accepted and recited without any critical thought. Freire’s observation here does open up discussion on the nature of learning and the various learning theories that have been proposed to explain how learning is done. Although we do not have the space to fully explore the impact of these theories upon Yeaxlee’s statement, it is worth mentioning that ‘we need to be wary of adopting any all-embracing theory of learning that implies exclusivity’ (Rogers 2002:8).

How we view ourselves as learners is also important to the argument as it informs this idea of unconscious learning that Yeaxlee suggests. The idea of a learner being an autonomous, independent self is ‘So deeply entrenched in the ethos of adult education as to be thought “obvious” or “self evident” and to thus be beyond question’ (Candy 1987:161). Although this sense of autonomy and self-awareness seems like a noble step towards empowerment, it is also argued that it may be an unhelpful assumption and that other concepts of ‘self’ could better articulate the task of adult education (Usher 1994:3-13). Yet regardless of these various learning theories and concepts of self, through examples like the High Ropes course, we can see that lifelong learning does not have to be a self-conscious activity. If we come to this conclusion, then we can agree with the part of Yeaxlee’s statement that ‘much adult education will never know itself as such’.

The remaining part of the original quote refers to the various settings in which adult education takes place, and is possibly the least difficult to interpret as the locations are familiar; clubs, churches, cinemas, theatres, concert rooms, trade unions, political societies, homes and groups of friends. Although all of the these locations do still exist in the early 21st century, there has been a large cultural shift within the last thirty years towards postmodernism and universal subjectivity where ‘people as individuals may have lost a string sense of identity in the face of flux and disarray in social roles and in political and cultural values‘ (YMCA 2007:7). Although the term is difficult to describe (Burke 2000), in postmodernism ‘identity is not unitary or essential, it is fluid or shifting, fed by multiple sources and taking multiple forms’ (Kumar 1997:98).

Due to this change in our culture and its impact on how individuals view themselves and the world around them, personal interaction and participation is becoming less common. The concept of social capital where ‘those tangible substances [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely good will, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit’ (Hanifan 1916:130) is harder to see in people’s lives. In fact, many people now do not participate significantly in social activity – ‘virtually all leisure activities that involve doing something with someone else, from playing volleyball to playing chamber music, are declining’ (Smith 2007).

This state of affairs is quite disconcerting. If participation in social and leisure activities is decreasing then so also are opportunities for interacting with others which we know to be important to us as humans. ‘Social connections are also important for the rules of conduct that they sustain. Networks involve (almost by definition) mutual obligations; they are not interesting as mere “contacts”‘ (Putnam 2000). However, although many of the traditional forms of social interaction are disappearing or becoming less common, there are many new and innovative ways of learning from one another. The impact of technological progress has been astounding and items we now take for granted as a medium for exchanging information were not in use when Yeaxlee wrote his statement: television, computers, the internet, email, mobile telephones and text messaging are examples. The growth of broadband internet and social networking websites such as MySpace or Facebook are testimony to the fact that people are communicating and absorbing information at a faster pace than ever before and ‘while growth is slowing at most top Internet sites, it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information’ (Walker 2006:D01).

Technology now changes so fast that even recent advances become obsolete to parts of the population. Teenagers are now shunning email – a relatively recent form of communication – in favour of more immediate and personal responses such as text messaging or instant messaging clients.

“Everyone sends e-mails because you have to e-mail your instructors, you have to e-mail your grandma, that’s the way the world works,” he said. But, he added, ‘’it’s sort of an old fogey way of communicating.” (quoted by Ostricher, 2007)

There are many concerns that have been written about the postmodern, cynical and socially isolated generations that extend beyond the scope of this article. Here we must remain focused on Yeaxlee’s statement. In rewriting the settings where lifelong learning can occur, we should update some of the specific locations such as concert rooms and trade unions to a more generic description that reflects the subjectivity of postmodernism. It would then be possible to give some specific examples of mediums that could be used for learning just as Yeaxlee did, but instead of wireless sets and gardens, we could perhaps chose to incorporate some of the technological aspects of social communication mentioned above.

So what can we conclude about the original quote made by Yeaxlee in 1929? Does it stand up to criticism 80 years after it was originally written? We have looked into definitions of adult education and lifelong learning opting to use the latter as it seems clear that Yeaxlee had a broader agenda in mind than simply educating those over eighteen. We have briefly examined experiential learning, theories of learning, and concepts of self, and as such we may have polarised or characterised some of the arguments where they are in fact far more complex and intricate. However, although we find that society and culture has changed to a more individualistic and subjective nature, the idea that lifelong learning will continue in a variety of settings, is still true today and supports the statement that Yeaxlee was making. We have also argued that some of the settings Yeaxlee described may have changed, and so in light of these discoveries, if we were to rewrite the statement for today’s audience it could read:

Much lifelong learning will never recognise itself as educational… It will go on through social activity, anywhere that people interact, and through various media including the internet, television, radio, music and newspapers.

Although these changes may alter the charm and optimism that comes across from the original, in essence they are only surface modifications that may translate better in the early 21st century. It seems that Yeaxlee was entirely accurate with his observations that much of this kind of informal learning will never recognise itself and will continue throughout an individual’s lifetime. The statement made eighty years ago is still relevant today because adult education is an ‘organised and sustained instruction designed to communicate a combination of knowledge, skills and understanding valuable for all the activities of life (UNESCO quoted by Jarvis 1990:105).

Bibliography

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• Burke, Barry (2000) ‘Post-modernism and post-modernity’, the encyclopaedia of informal education, www.infed.org/biblio/b-postmd.htm.
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To reference this article, please cite: Jolly, J. (2009) ‘Lifelong Education: Eighty Years On’ in YMCA (2009) Contexts, Occasional Paper Volume 2, London: YMCA George Williams College.