“EDUCATION”

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Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams and education – a slow reach again for control

Raymond Henry Williams (1921-1988) wrote little directly related to

education during his long career, and has rarely been thought of as an
educational thinker. Despite this, education courses through his work, and if
one looks carefully, much can be found within it to enrich pedagogical
thought and practice.

In what follows, I will describe Williams’ cultural roots and earlyeducational

experiences, his thoughts on adult education and lifelonglearning, his
concern with informal education and public pedagogy,and his general
thinking about the transformative power of culture,perhaps his greatest
contribution to pedagogy in the widest sense.

Early encounters with community and schooling

Raymond Williams was born in 1921 in Pandy, Wales to a working class,
politically-left-leaning family (his father, a railway worker, was also the
secretary of the local Branch Labour Party in the 1920s) (see Smith 2008). He
was an exceptional student, attending Llanfihangel elementary school before
winning a prestigious scholarship to King Henry VIII Grammar School in
Abergavenny in 1932. The notion of education and intellectualism were
central to Williams’ Welsh village community. Unlike other working-class
students he later met in university, he was always encouraged in his
intellectual pursuits. As he later explained, he attributed this to Wales’ unique
cultural climate:

there was absolutely no sense in which education was felt as something

curious in the community…There was absolutely nothing wrong with being
bright, winning a scholarship or writing a book…Historically, Welsh
intellectuals have come in very much larger numbers from poor families than
have English intellectuals, so the movement [into intellectual life] is not
regarded as abnormal or eccentric…The typical Welsh intellectual is—as we
say—only one generation away from shirt sleeves. (Williams 1979: 29)

That said, as child in Wales, Raymond Williams learned more than just an
appreciation for the life of the mind. He also began to see education and
politics as deeply intertwined, a lesson that marked him deeply. In the Wales
of Williams’ boyhood, formal schooling served as a means of supplanting
local cultures with the official culture of the British Empire. Children in Pandy
were punished for speaking Welsh in schools, and were taught, above all
else, about the glories of ‘English Civilization.’ As he was finishing at King
Henry VIII, Raymond Williams’ father and his headmaster colluded to send
him to Cambridge University without his consultation. He later recognized
that this educational official played a small but important role in the
colonizing process, by identifying talented local children and whisking them
away to elite English universities, thus neutralizing their potential anti-
colonialist tendencies. (Williams 1979: 37)

Raymond Williams began reading the ‘English Tripos’ (modern languages,

history, and classics) at Cambridge in 1941, before being called to service
during World War II. After serving as a wireless operator and tank operator,
he returned to Cambridge in 1946 to finish his studies. Immediately after, he
was appointed as a Staff Tutor in the Oxford University Tutorial Classes
Committee—also known as the Extra-Mural Delegacy and Workers
Education Association (WEA).

Raymond Williams, adult education and lifelong learning

As an adult educator, Raymond Williams began to reconcile the schism

between the community-based informal education he receive in Pandy, and
the ‘official,’ elite education bestowed upon him through English schooling
and higher education. He did so by attempting to use Oxford’s adult
education programme to actualize a process of lifelong learning conducive to
a radical expansion of community and democracy. Williams insisted that
‘education was ordinary,’ and was a means through which people of all ages
could both immerse themselves in a common culture, and refine and sharpen
that culture against their own individual experiences. (Morgan 2002: 253)
Adult education offered a unique means of deconstructing the social
hierarchies created by other forms of education, rather than reinforcing those
hierarchies in the name of private or commercial interests. In adult education,
people could cultivate critical skills by interacting with others whom they
might not normally encounter (a factory labourer and a physician could
engage in philosophical discourse, for instance) and thus create a concrete,
working model for a future democratic society (Williams 1993: 221; 219)
Education as a mere means of post-war material advancement–a means of
creating a “newly mobile and varied elite”–was anathema to Williams’
conception of lifelong learning. (Williams 1993: 223)

For Raymond Williams, adult education as a means of expanding democracy

meant all involved would be educated—including the educators. Anticipating
Paulo Freire’s great work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (published in 1968),
Williams argued in the early 1960s that the educational process cuts both
ways. The adult instructor has much to learn about herself and her discipline
from her students. Ideally, through adult education, instructors and students
would ‘meet as equals’ in the classroom, and share fully in the process of
democratic learning. (This is not to suggest that Raymond Williams assumed
that students automatically knew more about a teaching subject than their
instructors—his was not an uncritical version of ‘student-centred learning’–
rather, he simply took it as given that the instructor is not beyond reproach:
the educator “may not know thegaps between academic teaching and actual
experience among many people; he may not know when, in the pressure of
experience, a new discipline has to be created.” Interaction with adult
students could give educators that experience) (Williams 1993: 225)

One experiment in democratic learning made possible through adult

education involved using technology to transcend the physical confines of
the classroom. For Raymond Williams, adult educatio offered a unique
opportunity to marry new communications media and pedagogy, expanding
the democratic reach of educational practice. As he wrote in 1959: There is
no necessary opposition between (education) through the small group and
the use of such new media as broadcasting and television. We all live at
different levels of community, and a healthy culture needs a corresponding
scale and variety of institutions. Broadcasting has helped adult education
both directly and indirectly. Television, at worst, has not harmed it. (Williams
1993: 220) The virtues and dangers of public pedagogy.

Raymond Williams was an important (if largely unrecognized) theorist and

proponent of ‘public pedagogy.’ Public pedagogy is an approach to
education that (in the words of the American educational historian, Lawrence
Cremin) “projects us beyond the schools to a host of other institutions that
educate: families, churches, libraries, museums, publishers, benevolent
societies, youth groups, agricultural fairs, radio networks, military
organizations, and research institutes.” (Cremin 1970: xi; see also Gramsci
1995: 249; Giroux 2006: 70) This expansive notion of education, in which
Williams saw great democratic potential, ran counter to education as
traditionally conceived from the nineteenth-century forward; that is, as either
the perpetuation of elite culture, or as a means of vocational training. Both
reproduced social inequalities, and did so partially through their confinement
to the controlled environment of the school-house. In addition to this, both
were fatally nostalgic, failing to take contemporary realities into account.
Raymond Williams saw modern people as swimming in a veritable sea of
new information and modes of communication—all of which educate. As he
wrote in 1953, in defence of the study of film as an adult educational subject:

[F]or conservatives and reformers alike [film] is shorthand for depravity and
cultural decay. Many fear that if education touches it, the taint will be indelible.
It is a pretty fear; but if adult education cannot handle and access an
institution which weekly serves the leisure of twenty-five million British adults,
and which deals well or badly, but at least with great emotive power, with the
values of man and society, then adult education deserves to fade. (Williams,
1993: 186)

Though he saw modern media such as film as intrinsically educational,this

alone did not guarantee it democratic status. The new informatione
nvironment was (and is) all too often inordinately influenced by interests that
care little for education or democracy. (McGuigan 1993: 168) A paradigmatic
example of Raymond Williams’ approach to new media as public pedagogy,
and the dangers that unequal access to the means of information production
hold for public pedagogy, can be seen in his analysis of the
commercialization of the printing press. The press, from its advent in the
sixteenth-century, was a mixture of public and private, commercial and non-
commercial elements. It was educative from the start, spurring on “the
formation of opinion, the training of manners, the dissemination of ideas.”
(Williams 1961: 175) That said, ratio of the commercial and non-commercial,
and thus the educative and the non-educative, was seriously upset in the
1890s due to the introduction of mass advertising. Through advertising, the
share of potentially liberating information in newspapers was dwarfed by that
that of commercial ‘persuasion.’ As a result, the press became a medium
dominated by a “selection of facts and opinions” related primarily to
capitalist expansion. The promise of an informed, critically engaged populace
suffered as a result. (Williams 1993: 123)

Characteristically for Raymond Williams, all is never lost, and the seeds of
renewal are never far from the surface. Mass media, though subject to anti-
educational interests, can still be rescued for the purposes of democracy. For
instance, centralized forms of information such as the press–which are likely
to be overtaken by singular interests–could usefully be combined with, and
offset by, regionallybased means of public education, such as “theatres,
orchestras, county societies, the great voluntary organizations, local
authorities, and the minority national cultural organizations.” (Williams 1993:
220) Similarly, a medium like television could be utilized for the public interest
(as it was in the heyday of the Open University, a project for which Williams
was an early, if not uncritical champion). If the entire informational
environment were directed towards education and by extension democracy,
and if the “extreme hostility which has been all too common in education
towards the general communications services” could be overcome,
Raymond Williams believed that the political dividends would be enormous,
and what we now conceive as ‘education’ could be superseded by
something altogether more ‘public’ and effective (Williams 1993: 230)

Culture as a medium for political transformation

On the most basic level, perhaps Raymond Williams’ most important lesson
for educators is the deep and continuous emphasis he placed upon culture
as both a constitutive element of society, and as a potential means for social
transformation. Unlike many writers and thinkers on culture, who seal off it
from the rest of society, Raymond Williams refused to divorce culture from
other concerns. For him, culture cannot be understood in isolation from the
social ground from which it springs, or from the reciprocal effects it has upon
the social environment. He stated this still sadly unorthodox position as early
as 1947 in a journal he edited entitled Politics and Letters:

If a critic of literature is genuinely interested in the contemporary and

traditional work which he criticizes, then he cannot fail to be concerned about
much more than literature itself. He is obliged to enquire particularly into what
modern literature reflects of contemporary social experience and into the way
in which social life influences the subject, form, and language of literature.
But beyond these researches, he must accept the responsibility for whatever
it is that literature represents in society. (Williams 1993: 34)

This marriage of culture and politics did not ingratiate Raymond Williams to
England’s academic elite. As Terry Eagleton points out, Williams politicized
culture just enough to alienate him from his peers, and to have his version of
culture “thrown back in his face by the cultivated.” (Eagleton 1989: 5) As
Raymond Williams moved further to the left in the 1970s, his notions of
culture moved with him—and so did the controversy he generated. Unlike
many leftists of the time, Williams refused to treat culture as a second-order
political concern. The simplified version of Marxism then fashionable all too
often subordinated culture to a mere reflection (or ‘superstructure’) of the
economic mode of production (or ‘base’) practiced in a given period. Drawing
on the work of the Italian cultural and political theorist Antonio Gramsci,
Williams rejected this ‘economistic’ view of society. Instead, he advanced a
position which had culture, economics, and politics in deep and shifting
interaction with one another. A social formation at a given historical moment
was for Williams a “complex interlocking of political, social, and cultural
forces.” (Williams 1977: 108) In such a situation, culture is, if anything, the
key constituent. Culture—particularly in institutional forms such as schooling
and higher education—is crucial to rendering economic and political
arrangements ‘natural,’ and thus ‘inevitable’ and ‘unchangeable.’ Culture
‘internalizes’ political arraignments, and makes them a vital part of public and
private experience. (Williams 1977: 110) Once naturalized through culture,
such an arrangement gains immeasurably in influence.

But for Raymond Williams, if culture is a key factor in modern political

arrangements, it also contains their potential undoing. Within any cultural and
political formation, nodes of resistance are ever-present. The dominant
formation always contains remnants of the cultural past (or, the ‘residual’),
and generates new cultural forces (the ‘emergent’) which can be turned
against an existing cultural and political order. Human agency always
shadows domination. As he emphatically stated in 1977’s Marxism and
Literature: “no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order
and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all
human practice, human energy, and human intention.” (Williams 1977: 125)
Thus, within the culture that oppresses, lies the ‘imminent critique’ that can
be used to overthrow oppression in the name of a deeper and more total
form of democracy. Educators play an obvious and essential role in such a
project.

Conclusion: Raymond Williams and education

As mentioned in the beginning of this piece, Raymond Williams’ Influence

upon educators and pedagogical theorists has been indirect, if not slight.
Considering that in education, more than in most activities, culture and
politics come together in a radically concrete fashion, and that education is,
by its very nature, a site in which ‘human practice, human energy, and human
intention’ can flourish or be stifled, Williams’ absence from pedagogical
debate is genuinely unfortunate. But as more than one cultural worker has
discovered, Williams has a way of making his presence known eventually.
Stuart Hall has written as much: “I have often had the uncanny experience of
beginning a line of thought or inquiry, only to find that, apparently
coincidentally, he had not only been travelling much the same road but had
given the issues a clearer, more forceful and clarifying formulation.” (Hall
1989: 55) Educators would benefit immeasurably by acquainting themselves
with his rich and endlessly rewarding work, and by doing so sooner rather
than later.