brambles

Holiday thoughts for a wee while now, possibly on different topics from the usual. Today I'm thinking about brambles. The days are slowly getting shorter. There's a coolness in the air sometimes now that prompts autumn thoughts. But shortening days and a lower sun don't have to be bad news, they can mean gold-coloured days and fruitfulness. And scoffing brambles just pulled from the bushes. I'm always amazed to see people in city parks, for instance, walking straight past this yummiest and healthiest of treats.

To see brambles in the supermarkets, sealed with cellophane into their plastic punnets, just seems wrong. Brambles are for picking and enjoying wild, and making your own jam, not for buying in supermarkets.

Ditch "lifelong Learning"?

sigh...another big delay, nothing since the anniversary of the 21 May 1980 solar flare. I'm blaming those people who said, "great idea, Alec, we'll all take a shot." Anyway, here comes another amateur intrusion into other peoples' disciplines:

Adult education, continuing education, lifelong learning ... what do we call it? Perhaps some of us asked this question recently as we pondered our rebranding to settle on Open Studies. A twisted desire for novelty wasn't our sole driver - although confusion with our colleagues across the city wouldn't have been good - but maybe we have avoided some of the baggage associated with those older terms.

Names are dangerous. I think we should regularly rename anything we think valuable. A name that attains weight and value will be appropriated to other ends. "Lifelong learning" is our phrase du jour, immediately recognisable even in its abbreviated form, LLL. But it's a soft target, even assuming it ever denoted the valuable ideas we think it did. So often now it means acquiring new computer techniques every year or two, or learning the new controls for the latest version of the assembly line; synonymous with "continuing professional development" if you're well-paid, "retraining" otherwise. We're keen to distinguish between "education" and "training" but "learning" can describe what happens to people in both cases. So "lifelong learning" is vulnerable from the outset.

A couple of weeks ago this year's Access programe came to an end with the presentation evening, when we hand our students certificates and wish them all the best for the future. The sense of achievement, of new vistas revealed, always leaves a warm glow for the mind to turn over afterwards; a wee bit like that glow you get from fine malt whisky, but without the danger of a hangover.

Access is not part of "lifelong" learning for many of our customers; what's lifelong is the opportunity, the possibility. It's there whenever you decide to take advantage of it, even if you go twenty years before you want to. For many of them it is the first formal learning experience they've been involved in for a long long time - they have certainly not been "lifelong learners", although they might be from now on. There are lots of people who come to adult education courses year after year, deepening their understanding of some particular subject or broadening their knowledge of many. But there's no doubt a very valuable part of what we do involves not a sustained and consistent approach to learnimg, but a step change for the person involved. It's this transformative potential that makes it so rewarding for us to teach. It has particular value precisely because it's not "lifelong".

So, the more I reflect on the end of another year of Access, the more I like our new name. We're "open" whenever people feel the need for us, whether it's an ongoing need regularly satisfied, or something that's been nagging more and more insistently for many years.