As Ivor Goodson has argued, public education has historically been subject to recurrent pendulum swings, between times when education is seen as the path to enlightenment and democracy, and those dominated by governments committed to subordination and social control. (1) Liberals and socialists have for a very long time championed education as a means to progress. And, within this, the role of adult education has been particularly important, because it has enabled access to education for those who would otherwise have been excluded, and it has played an important role in the development of a democratic politics. Currently, however, we are living through a period when the pendulum has swung back to a less inclusive and less democratic idea of the role of education in society.

I would argue, with Raymond Williams, that the adult education arena is profoundly political. A commitment to making learning available throughout life is at the nexus of wider societal debates about the relationships of power over communities: who governs them and how; the role of the state in exercising organised control; the extent to which communities can self-govern; and the ways in which power and resources are ultimately organised. The extent to which citizens are able to challenge the status quo from a position of knowledge and understanding is a central determinant in any account of societal and individual change. Such knowledge is both an exhilarating possibility to the community learner and a source of profound disquiet, fear and anxiety to those in power. As E.P. Thompson (who was an adult educationalist as well as an historian) once argued, adult education, by its very nature, is 'a relationship of mutuality, a dialectic', because it brings together adults with a wealth of differing life experiences, and involves an intellectual exchange based on equality of experience. (2) Adult education is a space where ideological tensions play out between the individual, the social and the civic; and between those who challenge and those who seek to conserve the status quo. Adult education has been embraced as a radical/emancipatory force by activists within the working class--and has also been seen as part of a civilising/liberalising mechanism. But in both these approaches it is linked to our understanding of democracy. Richard Bernstein uses the notion of democratisation as a means of understanding that there is no fixed or final state of democracy: it is a continuous process. (3) And Raymond Williams writes of the need to support 'an educated and participating democracy' through a process of education that is 'part of the process of social change itself'. (4)

And at this juncture in our national, collective and cultural life, we need to talk more than ever, and to become part of that social change. The ravages of years of austerity politics and policies have made Britain the most profoundly unequal society in Europe, and much of the civil society infrastructure that we built together in the second half of the twentieth century, in the post-war settlement period, has been...