THE JOB OF ADULT EDUCATION
Wicker, Brian
FROM BRITAIN THE JOB OF ADULT EDUCATION A few days ago a parish priest with an interest in adult education faced me wtih the following question: "Last Sunday at Mass, as I was reading the...
...From the point of view of the man in the pew, as a recent test case has shown, talking about 'niggers, coons and wogs' is an extremely easy way of arousing feelings in Britain just now...
...It seemed rather pointless to have come several thousand miles to find oneself in so familiar a bit of suburbia...
...Nobody to say mass for, nobody to reassure him that his job is worthwhile...
...Spiritual' things which seem quite impossible to Western intellectuals are normal to India...
...And this is a matter of the whole culture within which the Church has to operate...
...If you carry on about "the joy in your heart" long and loud enough, you will, with luck, somehow come to experience it...
...The last thing he wants (but the first thing he needs) is then a kind of disturbance...
...So in a curious way, even a modern guitarridden mass in Bombay feels more authentic than the same thing in Birmingham...
...And then where would the parish priest be...
...Most modern hymnsinging expresses not faith, but a craving for it: something to believe in, something to feel strongly about...
...My wife and I spent the five weeks just before Christmas in North India...
...They are mainly to cheer people up...
...So, not surprisingly, when I tried to think of something helpful to say, my answer must have seemed pretty unconvincing...
...So talking about personal immortality, or 'heaven' (like a lot of modern theologizing) is mostly a sort of self-reassurance by people whose natural inclination is towards disbelief...
...Above all, the same hymns: or rather, the same cheerful modern doggerel sung to the same jingles with the same selection of basic chords strummed on the same brands of guitar...
...One has only to consider the sorts of feelings aroused by the National Front, with its easy racist 'answers' to the immediate problems of living, to see that there is plenty of feeling about...
...Orwell once contrasted modern faith with the faith of old hymns like "Jerusalem My Happy Home" by pointing out that nowadays, whatever people's minds tell them, they do not feel themselves to be destined for 17 March 1978: 166 eternal life...
...So it doesn't make much difference in the end whether the young man in the back pew is sympathetic too, or abominates such language: his feelings are likely to be significantly engaged either way...
...It seems to me that a lot of what Orwell says is true—in England...
...The sad fact is that the Church has nothing with this sort of emotional charge to offer...
...And this is not only true of the Hindu belief in the cycle of rebirth: it is true also of the Christian belief in personal survival...
...But throughout this variegated kaleidoscope of new experiences and friendships, one thing stood out clearly everywhere: the Indian genius for feeling...
...indeed rather deeply involved in it...
...Until the formula for doing this has been found, he must not be 'upset'— because of course, he may then just go away...
...Perhaps this is why so many young people are to be found at it...
...As a Catholic educator, tell me what could you do about that sort of thing...
...brian wicker (Brian Wicker is Commonweal's regular correspond...
...Modern hymns are designed for the downhearted...
...It comes out in innumerable ways...
...He has renewed his subscription to God, and his conscience is clear...
...No wonder that the Daily Mirror seems more interesting than the Daily Missal...
...But on reflection, I think I now know what my reply ought to have been...
...But then one has to recognize that the Indian heritage is something the Catholic community does not know much about, and even does not want to know too much about...
...Of course I'm not saying that the British lack feelings: simply that their feelings are so often misplaced...
...But for me the important point about the hymns was this...
...Ordinary people there may not cogitate much about the problem of immortality, but this doesn't really matter: for they feel it in their bones...
...Christianity has been a creative disturbance in Indian life, as Ramchandra Gandhi (the Mahatma's grandson, who teaches philosophy in Delhi University) pointed out to me...
...But I don't think it is true about India...
...To become absorbed in the authentic Indian tradition must inevitably mean taking on some of the worst as well as the best things in it...
...The answer is something to do with India...
...It is true that large numbers of liberally-minded and earnest educators of the past and the present have tried to console themselves with comforting stories about successful ventures into working-class adult education...
...I mean there is a connection between the sense I had of the Catholic community living at a certain distance from the mainstream of Indian culture and just those things it does best—the active, outgoing, energetic things...
...FROM BRITAIN THE JOB OF ADULT EDUCATION A few days ago a parish priest with an interest in adult education faced me wtih the following question: "Last Sunday at Mass, as I was reading the gospel, I noticed a young man in the back pew who was reading the Daily Mirror...
...And this creativity is something to do with being a group apart...
...So the problem is how to regain the relevant sorts of feeling which alone can help the man in the pew to discover for himself, in his own bones, that potentiality for eternal life which is the gift of faith...
...So feelings, it seems to be assumed, can actually create the very things they crave...
...This is perhaps particularly so in the case of religion...
...No amount of theoretically 'relevant' modern thought about Christ can give us the feeling that we have eternal life within us...
...Kinsley Reade, who used these words in a speech, and let him off with a mild caution, was too out of touch with reality to notice this...
...he wants it to be open and he regards this as practically tantamount to having opened it for you...
...The same selection of words, the same range of thoughts, the same appeals for good causes, the same clothes, the same statues, the same hymns...
...So the question is not one that can be answered within the limits of contemporary sensibility...
...He will do this simply out of sheer fellow-feeling...
...This brings me back to the young Britisher in the back pew with his Daily Mirror...
...In other words in Britain (or America), it has always seemed to me, the modern style of Catholic musical uplift suggests not the possession of a deep spiritual conviction but a frenetic attempt to manufacture one...
...and of course in some sorts of case, they can...
...For the fact is that, at the present juncture and in the present condition of British culture, there is nothing much the Church can say to that man: nothing, that is, to help him feel that 'assisting at mass' (that almost forgotten but significant phrase, with the deeply ambiguous meanings) is much more than a helpful habit, an insurance policy or a source of solace...
...He is there, probably, because he wants to feel that he has paid his respects and his dues...
...Physically and even intellectually, the Sunday mass we went to there was barely distinguished from the same thing in suburban Birmingham...
...Unhappily, the judge who tried Mr...
...After all, the stuff that is produced in Europe or America does not travel very well, and there is a sort of alienation in the very idea of Indians, with their own massive heritage to draw upon, aping the West at its least impressive...
...But the facts are on the whole against them...
...Having spent the last seventeen years of my professional life trying to find ways of encouraging more than a tiny handful of the unskilled working-class to enter any form of adult education, I was naturally flummoxed...
...If you innocently ask, for example, for the nearest place where you can cash a traveler's check on a bank holiday (a common enough need, given the number of bank holidays there are), the average Indian will suggest some place you can go to even though he knows that it won't be open...
...We heard such varied sounds as those of the drums and harmoniums of folk-musicians in medieval Jaisalmer (a sandstone jewel in the middle of the desert) and of the omnipresent and inescapable motor-horns of downtown Delhi—which must surely be one of the noisiest, as well as one of the dustiest cities in the world...
...For example, take the case of your average parish mass in a Bombay church...
...But this means that the question mentioned at the outset is really unanswerable because, implicit in it is the assumption that above all the young man must not be 'upset.' That is, the answer must be sought within the given framework of parish 'life.' He must be offered a better kind of reassurance (nothing wrong with that) and the job of adult education in the Church today must be to provide this, by bringing to bear upon the problem all the riches and the insights of modern Catholic sensibility and modern post-Vatican II theology...
...And without an adequate diet of such feeling at its disposal the Church cannot do its job...
...Our tour ranged from the Himalayan foothills to Bombay, and we saw such disparate things as the postwar Bombay skyscrapers (built on reclaimed land with aid of the latest bulldozers) and the huge Kailasa temple at Ellora (carved out of the solid basalt of the Deccan more than a thousand years ago with nothing but hammers and chisels...
...With the possible exception of courses designed for improving people's literacy, their job-opportunities, or their efficiency at the negotiating table with employers, the unskilled manual working-class in Britain is today conspicuously absent, certainly in anything like its rightful proportion, from all forms of adult educaton...
...Let me explain...
...Yet there are profound dangers in the situation...
...The Daily Mirror is a popular tabloid newspaper with a vast working-class readership...
Vol. 105 • March 1978 • No. 6
