Thirty years of adult education

Press, 21 October 1978, Page 10

Thirty years of adult education

Structures and Attitudes in New Zealand Adult Education, 1945-1975. By Barry M. Williams. New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 243 pp. $lO. (Reviewed by Mervyn Palmer)

If this work is described as a study of adult education between the Consultative Committee Report, “Further Education for Adults,” (1947) and “Directions for Educational Development” (1974), which was the final report of the Education Development Conference. education historians, at least, will instantly recognise the landmarks. Barry Williams book usefully meets many needs. The most valuable service is the author’s skilful mustering of source materials. As increasing numbers of students begin to take up critical studies of New Zealand adult education, the biggest challenge they face is that of coming to grips with the motley of records scattered across the country. A substantial bibliographical appendix together with meticulous foot-noting helps the reader to share the fruits of much time devoted to data hunting, but without the effort, and (all too often) the frustration.

The general reader will not find the storv of adult education from 1945 to 1975 easy to enter. Williams rightly comments that it is often a sad story.

To the uninitiated, it will also seem to be a puzzling story in which the actors engage in the set-pieces of councils and committees. of commissions and working parties. The path is strewn with parish pumps and is patrolled by “big brothers” in spite of whom the anxieties over toetreading in the rush to provide for aault educational needs, felt and unfelt, appear to verge upon neurosis.

Since the theme of the book has to do with structures and attitudes, it was inevitable, in the view of the present writer who shared similar experiences to those of Williams, that the reality of mature people sharing an opportunity to learn would not show through brightly. Bringing the outside world under the scrutiny of a “class” of high-country farmers; moulding a lively assortment of ageing individuals into a group to release some of their latent creativity — these are the trivia of adult education. They also represent the more cheerful and the richer aspect of the subject which forms the foundation of another theme.

Barry Williams could be accused of leading us into the tangled web of structures and attitudes and leaving us there without the benefit of a denouement Judgments are lacking, and rightly so, for Williams is a historian daring to write in the middle of an unfinished chain of events. He

can observe the characteristic disarray of adult education; he can suggest ways for the introduction of more appropriate systematisation that will not deny its essential need for freedom of action. Like most of us, he must then wait and watch the Cinderella of our education world still staring at her one glass slipper while she justifies herself between the. camps of vocational and non-vocational learning, symbolised by a battered text-book in one hand and a rolling pin in the other.

The perceptive reader will not miss the points that lie between Williams’s lines. Structures and attitudes in the 30 years under scrutiny have failed to produce well-ordered ranks of adults all solemnly being educated in the leftover time of the teachers in our various tertiary institutions. Simpler, but also more elusive formulae are needed to fire the enthusiasm to learn first felt by the searching adult. There is a lot to be learnt from Williams’s account of the 30-year postwar period. A new generation of continuing educators shows some signs ot having learned to be more sensitive to the real sources of need in the learning adult. For them, and for all who profess to be concerned with continuing education, Barry Williams’s hook will remain an essential re'erence for a long time.