Today I glanced at the BBC website while eating my excellent soup and sandwich from the St Andrews Building cafe and learned about Lenny Henry's "slow-burn academic career". A very familiar story, really, to DACE people, somebody bright and able who didn't thrive in school but valued education enough to come back to it repeatedly. His particular story gets a public telling because he's a high-profile media figure but there are thousands and thousands of similar tales across the country, some of those people passing through our very own doors.
Each one of these stories has its own particular features, life events, influences from family, friends, places, wider culture. He evidently learned to value learning in the family home and that stayed with him in spite of school experiences; a wee moral for any of us who are parents. And I was glad he liked his science teacher - but sadly not enough to actually study science.
It would be nice to see lots more of these stories written down in one place, not just those of celebrities. You would get such a rich sense of the complexity and variety of adult lives, the myriad ways in which learning stays alive in them, all the stories hidden behind statistics and policies. Does that exist, outside academic journals (where 'biographical studies' are a well-defined genre)? Who could do it....?
In the meantime, well done Lenny Henry and good luck with the PhD.
The ILA Scotland website includes a few individual stories: http://www.ilascotland.org.uk/LearnerInfo/Benefits+of+learning.htm These don't really tell the sort of story I got from the Lenny Henry article, though, they're quite focused on how the individuals involved have used ILA, and why learning has been useful to them in practical terms.
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