Does anybody care about adult education?

Adult Literacy? Who cares about that? What does it matter if those classes close down? In the current climate we can't afford to pay for them…

Did you know that somewhere in a local college or community venue near you, classes that help adults develop their reading, writing and spoken English are under threat of closure asks Dr Rob Smith of Wolverhampton University.

This is because college funding for these courses has been reduced for the second year in a row. In our funding-driven further education colleges, that downgrading means that fewer colleges will run such courses: the financial incentive for them is simply no longer going to be there.

But why does it matter?

It matters for a number of reasons. The first is that it tells us a lot about the government's agenda to instrumentalise our education system, to transform our schools and colleges into places where young people are drilled in demonstrating 'skills' to make them employable.

This government is following the same old mantra that was first enunciated by James Callaghan's Labour government in the 1970s.

Callaghan's so-called Great Debate speech chastened teachers, criticising them for being responsible for an education system that wasn't closely enough linked to the 'needs of employers.'

Exactly what those 'needs' were wasn't specifically identified, but ever since Callaghan's speech, year-after-year, decade-after-decade, politicians of every party have been designing and redesigning and tweaking and chopping our education system until the teachers don't know their R's from their elbows.

Since then, the curriculum has been micro-managed. Taxpayers' money has been spent paying civil servants to draw up minutely detailed documents that prescribe precisely what teachers should do in classrooms.

The levels of achievement between each year have been intricately worked out, so that children and adults' progress can be calibrated against a fixed set of outcomes.

Teachers have felt as though ministers have been sitting in the corner of their classrooms with a clipboard and a biro, checking a tick list lesson by lesson.

Many say it is as though schools and colleges are being run on the same lines as a sausage factory.

That's a problem because people don't learn like that. Students learn at different speeds. The more relevant the curriculum is to their lives and their interests, the quicker they will pick things up.

But the current system militates against that: funding relates to student numbers and the curriculum is tightly controlled.

But there's something else that's seriously wrong. That is something that the Wolf Report (Review of Vocational Education) has finally brought out into the open: that courses which focus on learning low level 'skills' are not doing our young people or adult learners any favours.

These skills-orientated courses have never been and never can be a replacement for an education that is about expanding an individual's horizons and developing them as active and critical participants in our democracy.

The narrowing of the curriculum and its tight prescription has led to a dumbed down education for many. And the employers have been among the first to voice their dissatisfaction with the results.

These latest cuts to adult courses are just another example of the same old doctrine.

Strapped for cash in the wake of the bankers' excesses, the government has decided that money needs to be concentrated on the education of young people – the income tax payers of the future - that their 'skills' are vital for our economy.

So they are robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The adults who want to develop their skills are no longer a priority. If they want to better themselves and improve their chance of getting work, of moving on, of expanding their horizons – well, they're just going to have pay!

These are some of the most vulnerable people in our society and the doors that adult literacy classes open for them have been slammed shut and locked tight.

Image by Andrew Feinberg/Flickr