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‘A centre for common thought’


NIACE celebrates 90 years of support for adult learning this year. In the first of a series of articles marking the anniversary, PAUL STANISTREET looks at the origins of the organisation, its founding values and some of its early activities


Education Committee, chaired a meeting at 20 Tavistock Square, London, to consider the formation of a British Institute of Adult Education. The Institute was to be a branch of the grandly – and somewhat inaccurately – titled World Association for Adult Education set up by Mansbridge in March 1919. The ‘World Association’, which boasted a largely British membership with a modest inter- national dimension drawn from the dominions of the former British Empire, was committed to ‘the establishment, or development, in all parts of the world, of movements and institutions for promoting adult education, and to promote co-operation between them’. It proposed to do this by establishing a Central Bureau of Information in London, publishing a journal on adult education and setting up branches, groups, commissions or research committees in various countries in the world. The British Institute of Adult Education –


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what was, in 1983, after a number of changes in name and focus, to become NIACE, the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education – was to act as a general national forum for adult education, holding public meetings and exerting parliamentary pressure. The inaugural meeting of the British Institute, at the University of London Club in Gower Street on 28 May 1921, was attended by between 60 and 70 members and supporters, most of them university teachers or administrators. By its fourth meeting in September of that year there were 267 members. The primary aim of the Institute, in the


words of its first President, Lord Haldane, was to be ‘a centre for common thought by persons of varied experience in the adult education


22 ADULTS LEARNING JANUARY 2011


n 19 January 1921 Albert Mansbridge, founder of the Workers’ Educational Association and a member of the Ministry of Reconstruction’s Adult


movement’. It was to be a representative body and a ‘thinking department’, focused not on teaching but on discussion and advocacy. Initially, the Institute did not have its own premises and met in hired rooms. Its address for correspondence – 28 St Anne’s Gate, London – was the private address of Lord Haldane. Haldane, a former Secretary of State for War, President of Birkbeck College and sometime lecturer at the Working Men’s College in London, was a man of enormous political influence and was the force behind the early development of the organisation. Adult education was a passion with Haldane and he was committed to the extension of opportunities to attend university. University, he believed, was the place where enquiring minds were forged, where ‘men and women of ideas’ were produced.


University adult education Unsurprisingly, the Institute’s early bias was towards university adult education, although it also turned its attention to adult education in rural areas, adult education for fisher- men, women’s education and broadcasting, according to the tastes and interests of its members. The Institute was one of the first organisations to take seriously the power and reach of broadcasting, both in terms of education and the promotion of democratic citizenship (the Workers’ Educational Asso- ciation was another). In 1923 the World Association asked the Institute to investigate the position of education in broadcasting in England. It arranged a conference of voluntary education bodies likely to be interested in the use of broadcasting for educational purposes. It was one of many conferences and events the Institute was to organise as it developed its role as a key forum for debate on issues pertaining to adult education and as a critical means of bringing together different interests


and areas of expertise in learning. Meanwhile, the Institute continued to broaden its scope and its range of interests. In 1924 it published a report entitled The Guild House, which proposed that each town and cluster of villages should have a centre for adult education. The still young organisation was finding its own, distinct and influential voice. In 1925 the Institute became independent


of the World Association. It was now a fully autonomous organisation with its own membership and its own journal, the half- yearly Journal of Adult Education, which began publishing in 1926 (it became a quarterly entitled Adult Education in 1934, which became the monthly Adults Learning in 1989). The Institute also started an adult education library and commenced publication of a Handbook and Directory of Adult Education, edited by Basil Yeaxlee, a member of the Institute’s Council who, like Mansbridge, had sat on the Ministry of Reconstruction’s Adult Education Committee and contributed to its famous 1919 report. In 1929 Yeaxlee published Lifelong Education, arguably the first full statement of the importance of education as a continuing aspect of everyday life, surveying the roots of the adult education movement and giving equal value to formal, informal and non-formal learning. As we make progress, Yeaxlee wrote, ‘[w]e discover more, and not less, need of adult education’. Adult education ‘is as inseparable from normal living as food and physical exercise. Life, to be vivid, strong and creative, demands constant reflection upon experience, so that action may be guided by wisdom, and service be the other aspect of self-expression, while work and leisure are blended in perfect exercise of body, mind and spirit, personality attaining completion in society’. The Institute’s Council boasted a number of highly notable names beside Yeaxlee,


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