A reminder from the Centenary Commission on Adult Education
Research circle on fostering community, democracy, and dialogue
‘Culture is Ordinary’: space and place for the arts in radical lifelong learning’.

Join us on May 9th, from 10.00 to 12.30
Professor Emeritus Linden West will talk on: Centenary thoughts: distress in a city, culture is ordinary and a democratic education.
He writes:
It’s a hundred years since Stoke-on-Trent gained city status, and just over 100 years since the famous 1919 Report on ‘Adult Education as a permanent national necessity’ was published by the Ministry of Reconstruction. In that report, produced after the horrors of World War, Stoke-on-Trent has an honoured place in the history of adult/workers’ education. Longton was home to the first ever tutorial class forged in an alliance between progressives in universities and workers’ organisations. Here were spaces, I suggest, for dialogue, profounder forms of learning, and the shaping of a democratic imagination/structures of feeling, which in turn helped build a more inclusive, healthier society. That experiment ended in the closing decades of the twentieth century in the rise of neo-liberalism, fierce individualism, the loss of manufacturing industry, the weakening of democracy, and the associated rage of racism, fascism, and Islamic fundamentalism. Linden has chronicled some of these trends in his research and writing. He uses Stoke as a microcosm of a wider crisis of culture, democracy, and creative learning.
‘Culture is ordinary’ and ‘structures of feeling’ are phrases forged by renowned adult educator, cultural critic, and writer Raymond Williams. Reengaging with his inspirational work reminds of the two meanings of culture: as a whole way of life, but also of the role of the arts and learning in creating special processes of discovery, democratic reinvigoration and the social good. Williams helps us focus on how cultures, including rampant capitalism, can be top-down, manipulative and deeply disturbed. Or can, despite our troubles, be transformed in more inclusive, shared, vital and healthy ways.

Linden was born in Stoke, is Professor Emeritus at Canterbury Christ Church University, and author of Distress in the city, racism, fundamentalism and a democratic education. He is an award-winning international writer and researcher Linden West | LinkedIn

To book a place please reply to iain_jones@icloud.com

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