WEA Conference 2013 @ Cambridge: Building Communities in Challenging Times
Joan Bakewell
Thank you everyone. Well I’m delighted to join the WEA rave (laughs) and I’m hoping to galvanise
some excitement in this hall and beyond.
In the light of those OECD figures, which are an indictment of this country’s educational system, and
in the light of that Pakistani girl who has gone out on a limb for the entire female population of
Pakistan risking her life because they want to learn; what a strange imbalance there is between – call
it the East and West for the sake of simplicity – but between different ways of thinking and taking
risks for what you believe in.
I’m here to say: people love learning. They all do. Everyone loves learning. I’ve gone on record as
saying that I think that the country is failing to give learning to people who it neglects: those on
benefits; single mothers struggling with children; people in prison and planning to come out of
prison. All these people want to learn; they don’t find the right avenue for learning.
So, how do we learn? Well I am very proud to be here with the WEA, because my parents owe the
WEA so much. They grew up in Lancashire, humble folk; they left school at thirteen and my father
went into a foundry, and my mother became a trainee tracer in an electric-engineering company.
My father became an engineer, and that’s where they met. They didn’t have any further education
except studying engineering at night school (and my mother went to night school as well) but when I
was in my early teens, they would go out on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, to WEA classes.
They went along to the local Mechanics Institute, it was called then (Birkbeck College, incidentally,
began as a Mechanics Institute). And so, in my early teens, I knew that grown-ups learned. I knew
they went for lessons. I didn’t think of it as odd, or demeaning, or out of order in any way, and so
when I went to university, I was completely fluent with the idea that learning could go on all your
lives.
Now that is a real challenge now, because the system we have now funnels children and seems to
narrow and narrow the door through which they have to pass to get something called ‘An
Education’. But that isn’t how real education works. Take a child, a newborn baby – it’s learning from
the moment it’s born. It learns from its mother immediately, and then from its home. It is learning
enormously fast as its brain develops; its learning, its going on learning, its brain is excited, and it’s
learning patterns of how to acquire skills.
LMuntus@wea.org.uk
WEA Conference 2013 @ Cambridge: Building Communities in Challenging Times
I believe that learning should flow continually through our brains as we get older. So I hope you will
examine today what is blocking that flow; what about our society is stopping that happening.
You look at the home when you get older – that’s where I learnt to cook; it’s where I learnt to sew.
We had a Singer sewing machine with a treadle and off we went. They were household skills. I have
to say, in those days, they were taught to daughters. They weren’t taught to sons. My son can use a
Singer sewing machine. That was the important change that we pledged ourselves to make in the
Feminist movement of the sixties: that we would equip our sons to be adults in the way we
equipped our daughters. And you perceive that difference don’t you? When you see young parents
with small children: fathers pushing prams, changing nappies, feeding from little pots of goo. And
they’re able to deal with children in a way that my father – although he was an enormously loving
father – would have found Not How Things Were. Well it is how things are now.
So that example of how we have changed the culture should be a guiding light to how we can move
forward and change the educational picture, because it clearly is failing. When it comes to public
education, how did Society ever go about it? I think – and I’m not Social Anthropologist, so I’m
winging a guess or two here, but it seems to me from what I’ve read – that what happened from,
say, Medieval times, is that young boys, usually, from the Upper Classes became pages in the
households of others. In working families, they became apprentices in the farms of others or where
their parents were part of the household system. So what is clear is that they moved from their
homes where they learned intensively, into the next social orbit around them, where they continued
to learn and were taught the skills that were needed.
Of course, in aristocratic households, they didn’t teach them too many skills because they didn’t
want any social revolution on the horizon and they didn’t want their authority to be usurped, but it
was clear, if you look at the stories (and you’ve all read Hilary Mantell, that her hero was the son of a
butcher) - people made their way. They made their way because of their wits, their character, their
connections, whatever they were, and their ambition. Which meant people were very much left on
their own, within a family and you made your own luck. A great many people did that with
enormous effect.
But then along came something from which we’ve all benefited: Universal Formal Education. It’s
hard to imagine if you look at the span of education over the centuries, how revolutionary that was.
And it only arrived in the nineteenth century. I was at Newnham, not Girton (Girton being the first
women’s college here); In my day (I got my degree in the fifties) – it was only five years after women
were allowed to take degrees at Cambridge. To actually take the degree! They could take the exam,
LMuntus@wea.org.uk
WEA Conference 2013 @ Cambridge: Building Communities in Challenging Times
and qualify as architects and surgeons; they could not get the scroll at the senate house; they could
not get their degree! So it’s relatively new and surprising in many ways that it has swept with great
enthusiasm right through society.
So my parents, when they left school at thirteen wanted to learn more, so did all their generation.
The ones who were trapped and not able to get further, felt disgruntled, and disappointed, let down
and I think we see the shadow of that in society today when people who are called – and I hate the
phrase, I resent it, but I’m going to use it – ‘skivers’ are people who are disappointed in their hopes.
These are people who as young children regarded the world as full of options to be enjoyed. They
looked around and saw on television, people having goods and opportunities that they thought
would be terrific as they grew older. And it didn’t happen. It hasn’t happened for far too many
people in our society. The system has become addicted to exams rather than to learning. And I think
we need a revolution in which people relish learning. They don’t dread going to school even though
Shakespeare wrote it into his plays – the school boy going unwillingly to school. Shakespeare of
course was at a very good Grammar school in Stratford-Upon-Avon. And the Grammar School
Generation has given birth to the spread of education across our country and yet, somehow, has let
a lot of people fall through the net.
You cannot do worse in any society than raise expectations and then dash them to the ground. That
is cruel. And it is dangerous, because disappointed people become disaffected people. Very often I
think of those who are held up for truancy. Very often children truant from school because they’re
often very bright and alert, not because they’re stupid; they’re bright and they’re bored. And they’d
rather be out knocking about somewhere learning to do all sorts of disreputable things. They’re
learning them, but they’re bored by routine and bad teaching, and perhaps a community that
doesn’t answer their needs or let them share properly. Teaching is a very difficult skill.
I noticed the other day that in one of the new situations that Michael Gove has set up, people who
are unqualified as teachers are now entering the world of education and that someone who had
become a headmistress of a primary school without any further training, because she got some
qualification from the City, had left the job after six weeks because she couldn’t cope. Is anyone
surprised by that? I don’t find that at all surprising. The skill of dealing with children, and dealing
with community is one of the most profound sets of knowledge that you can have. I’m not talking
about arithmetic and writing, I’m not talking about whether it’s phonetic teaching or not, but the
actual human insight needed to be a good teacher is incalculable.
LMuntus@wea.org.uk
WEA Conference 2013 @ Cambridge: Building Communities in Challenging Times
The WEA was founded because people who had fallen through the net wanted to learn. My parents,
who had got on in their working life, signed up to study classical music. They signed up to study
modern art. My mother had a problem with that. I have to say, she went on having a problem with
that. She said, “I can’t believe Picasso is really any good.” Then they signed up for Philosophy. These
weren’t vocational courses. This wasn’t going to make them any better at their job but it was making
them more fully rounded human beings. And so when I grew older and I went to University, I was
able to talk to them about the classes they’d been on and what they’d learnt, and to what extent
they understood what I was talking about. So was a link established with another generation? Now
here am I, talking about my parents’ background to you, so I feel that something has come full circle.
So now we’re faced with a very confusing picture in the country. We have the Labour ideology of
accessible education for all without fees; I’m speaking about the ideology, we know it’s been
tempered by many qualifications since then. And the Tory ideology of breaking the system into many
parts to bring in different providers. Seems to me rather a ramshackle pattern, that is yielding to
various pressures, not all of them education, many of them financial and others, rather intrusive. I’m
slightly wary of businessmen who feel they can educate people without such qualifications but that
is the sort of pattern we see with Academy funding and so on. Obviously as a Labour Peer, I’m very
sceptical about the Government policy. But stepping back from that, and saying overall, I can see
that there is confusion, there is no consistency. So young families growing up, wondering what to do
and how to deal with this network have not got a clear picture. They don’t grasp, and I’m not
surprised, the different ramifications of what sorts of things are available. How much local families
have said of our local primary school (which is where my children went), “It would be good, you
know, if all the children in this area just went to the local primary school and then went on to a
senior school. Wouldn’t that be simple?” It sounds enormously simple. How have we got ourselves
into this confusing mess in which children have no other way of asserting themselves with
character? They just blow the system wide open. They truant. They go off smoking and drinking in
the precinct. They express their disappointment and disillusionment in aggressive ways that we have
learnt to hate, and to punish? That’s not the way we should be approaching it, we should be
avoiding disappointing them.
One way to do that is to revolutionise the way we look at education. We don’t want young criminals
training in how to pick locks and open windows; we want them to enjoy what their mind and brain is
capable of. It need not be passing exams, but what we want them to be is capable members of our
community. And of course it does happen, and they grow up and marry and remember what they
missed out on. Birkbeck College, of which I’m proud to be the new president, is terrific at this
LMuntus@wea.org.uk
WEA Conference 2013 @ Cambridge: Building Communities in Challenging Times
because you see people, some of whom, many of whom already have some qualifications coming for
part time learning. You can take a full degree over the years at Birkbeck by coming to study late in
the evenings. Normal student life finishes about five o’clock and they start enjoying themselves
(probably a bit late for some); you go along to Birkbeck at five o’clock, and the place is heaving with
people who are all arriving for their evening classes and the lectures that go on there, right through
the building.
I’m happy to preside at the graduation ceremony which is terrific because they bring along their
children! One graduate last year even brought their toddler up on the platform to shake my hand as
the degree was handed to her. Their families come along, and it’s quite noisy, it’s full of celebration,
because these are people who have taken a degree in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. They
really relish learning.
Now that is one of the characteristics people tell me of teaching older people, because they’ve
realised that they want to catch up in some way, or they’ve realised that an extra qualification will
do their career good, they are happy to listen. I’m told, disappointingly, and this is gossip and really
not to be repeated as anything more serious than that, that sometimes lecturers who are teaching
younger students find that they are extremely hungover, or inattentive, or they’re tweeting, all the
way through the lecture. I think tweets should be left at the door but I’m told you can’t intrude on
people’s right for people to tweet wherever they want to be.
This is what I hope you will talk about in your workshops: I hope you will take the initiative that I feel
is called for- that this education and lifelong learning is a gift that everyone deserves. It’s a reward
that everyone deserves. The fine tradition of the WEA stands in the line of those who’ve done it so
well. So I hope you will go forward and make that possible for people who have been forgotten, and
neglected, and possibly rejected before it’s too late to give them a chance again.
LMuntus@wea.org.uk