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Border Country: Raymond Williams in Adult Education DOCUMENT RESUME ED 358 300 CE 063 833 AUTHOR Mcllroy, John, Ed.; Westwood, Sallie, Ed. TITLE Border Country: Raymond Williams in Adult Education. INSTITUTION National Inst. of Adult Continuing Education, Leicester (England). REPORT NO ISBN-1-872941-28-1 PUB DATE 93 NOTE 351p. AVAILABLE FROMNational Institute of Adult Continuing Education, 19B De Montfort Street, Leicester LE1 7GE, England, United Kingdom (12.99 British pounds). PUB TYPE Books (010) EDRS PRICE MFO1 /PC15 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS *Adult Education; Adult Educators; Adult Learning; Adult Literacy; Biographies; *Cultural Awareness; Cultural Education; Educational History; *Educational Philosophy; Foreign Countries; Higher Education; Interdisciplinary Approach; Literacy Education; Literary Criticism; Literature; *Popular Culture; Soeirl Change; Social Science Research IDENTIFIERS Great Britain; *Williams (Raymond) ABSTRACT This volume brings together a collection of writings from 1946-61 by Raymond Williams, a British university adult educator. Section 1is a brief account by Mcllroy of Williams' involvement in teaching adults, his intellectual influences, and the relationship of his educational and intellectual life to his personal experience and political concerns. Section 2 is a selection of Williams' published work that documents his chief intellectual concerns. It presents 14 writings ranging from pieces in the journals "Politics and Letters" and "The Critic" through early essayson the theme of culture and society to his review of "The Uses of Literacy," an extended dialogue with Richard Hoggart, and a contemporary evaluation of the New Left. Section 3 illustrates the changing curriculum and methods of literature teaching in university adult education and illuminates, in 12 articles on teaching culture and environment, public expression and film criticism, the beginnings of today's cultural studies. Section 4 is a series of 15 essays in which Williams analyzes contemporary controversies and concerns in adult education and reflects on the philosophy and purpose of adult education. Section 5, Retrospect and Prospect, contains an essay by Mcllroy integrating Williams' intellectual production with his role as a tutor in adult education and a discussion by Westwood of Williams' later book, "Towards 2000." An index is provided. (YLB) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * from the original document. *********************************************************************** U $ DEPARTMENT Of EDUCATION PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS Olhce of Educational Research and improvement MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY EO ATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERICI This document has been reproduced as C meowed from the person or orgaluzahon Originating it O Minor changes have been made to Improve reproduction Quality Pants of we* of opnionsstated in that dpcu mint do not movements represent°Mord TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES OERI oesdan or policy INFORMATION CENTER (ERICI weir P111111f MUIR Aot A Border Country Raymond Williams in Adult Education Edited by John Mcllroy (University of Manchester) and Sallie Westwood (University of Leicester) National Institute of Adult Continuing Education First published 1993 by the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (England and Wales), 19B De Montfort Street, Leicester LE1 7GE © Copyright selection N1ACE 1993 © Section introductions and named chapters, John Mcllroy 1993 © 'Excavating the future', Sallie Westwood 1993 For copyright in individual chapters, sec p v All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without the written permission of the publisher, save in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1 872941 28 1 Cover design Prestige Filmsetters, Leicester Cover photograph The Hulton Deutsch Collection lypeset in Sabot! by The Midlands Book Typesetting Co., Loughborough Printed and bound in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press, Melksham, Wilts =I> Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Section 1: The Unknown Raymond Williams 3 John Mcllroy Section 2: Cultural Politics 26 For Continuity in Change 31 Culture and Crisis 34 The Reading Public and the Critical Reader 38 Soviet Literary Controversy in Retrospect 41 The State and Popular Culture 54 The Idea of Culture 57 The New Party Line? 78 A Kind of Gresham's Law 84 Culture is Ordinary 89 Our Debt to Dr. Leavis 103 Fiction and the Writing Public 106 Working Class Attitudes 111 The Press and Popular Education 121 London Letter: The New British Left 127 Section 3: Teaching and Learning 132 Some Notes on Aim and Method in University Tutorial Classes 136 A Note on Mr Hoggart's Appendices 143 Some Experiments in Literature Teaching 146 Extracts from Reading and Criticism (1)The way we read now 152 (2)Critics and criticism 159 Literature in Relation to History: 1850-75 166 Books for Teaching Culture and Environment 174 The Teaching of Public Expression 181 Film as a Tutorial Subject 185 Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1)Review by J.R. Williams 193 (2) Reply by Raymond Williams 196 Text and Context 199 iii iv Contents Section 4: Adult Education 203 Figures and Shadows 207 Standards 211 Class and Classes 215 Going on Learning 218 An Open Letter to WEA Tutors 222 The Common Good 226 Reflections on Adult Learning (1)Roots of education 233 (2)Sensible people 235 (3)Workers' College 237 (4)Voices of Socialism: R.H. Tawney 238 (5)Different sides of the wall 242 (6)Open teaching 247 Adult Education 250 Adult Education and Social Change 255 Section 5: Retrospect and Prospect 265 Border Country: Raymond Williams in adult education 269 John Mcllroy Excavating the Future: Towards 2000 324 Sallie Westwood Index 337 Acknowledgements The publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material as follows: Essays in Criticism for 'The idea of culture'; 'The new party line?'; `Fiction and the writing public'. McGibbon and Kee, an impi+.it of Harper Collins Publishers Limited for `Cu lane is ordinary'. Blackwell Publishers for 'Our debt to Dr. Leavis'. New Left Review for 'Working class attitudes'. Partisan Review for 'The new British left'. Frederick Muller for extracts from Reading and Criticism. The English Association for 'Books for teaching culture and environment'. New Statesman and Society for 'Going on learning' and 'Sensiblepeople'. Tribune Publications Ltd for 'Voices of Socialism: R. H. Tawney'. Verso/NLB, London and New York for extracts from Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. Extracts from Rewley House Papers are reproduced with the permission of the Workers' Educational Association and the University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education. We are also grateful to the Workers' Educational Associationfor permission to reproduce extracts from The Highway, Williams's Open Letter to WEA Tutors and the extract from Adult Education and Social Change. We are indebted to the late Joy Williams and the estate of Raymond Williams for supporting this project. If there are any copyright holders who have not been credited, we will be happy to rectify such omissions. rti Introduction Raymond Williams was a towering figure within left culture and beyond it. He was revered, celebrated and debated in Britain and across theworld for the contribution he made to the generation and sustenance of socialist thought and to the cause of innovative scholarship in literature, cultural studies, politics and sociology. Despite this, his work in adult education, the forcing house of his interdisciplinary approach, has received scant attention from the left, from academic interrogators of his achievement and, surprisingly, from within adult education itself. We can only speculate on the reasons for this. Perhaps for theleft neglect was conditioned by the fact that his adult education work pre-dated his renewed activism in the sixties and his second and major encounter with Marxism. Within adult education itis possible that relative silence has stemmed from the fact that his world-wide reputation burgeoned later and was perceived as based upon his renewed radicalism. Whatever the reasons wetake issue with these silences. They deny a specific and, we would argue, an important part of the personal and intellectual biography of Raymond Williams. This collection is our attempt to draw attention to Williams's life and his preoccupations in the immediate post-war period and to place on record his early writings. Much of Raymond Williams's early work has long been inaccessible. The articles written during his years in adult education were scattered in small journals, sometimes long defunct, buried in the reserve stack or available to the student only through inter-library loans. More extended essays such as Reading and Criticism remainmuch-cited but out of print. This volume gathers together for the first time most of Williams's short pieces, the majority of them out of print for 20 years, together with extracts from longer work. Our hope is that a new generation may discover at first hand the quality of Williams's writing in this period and its relationship to the development of his classic texts Culture and Societyand The Long Revolution. The book opens with a brief
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