Letters

I suspect that MT can number amongst its diverse readership musicians involved in varying degrees with the education of adults who never learned to play or sing as children. It should be obvious to everyone actively interested in music education that learning a musical skill is rewarding to the learner in many different ways. Adult education can constitute one of the most satisfying experiences, for here teacher and student meet as equals in a conjuncture of discovery involving the acquisition of practical skill, the social dimension of playing and singing together, and the progressive initiation into, and intellectual contemplation of, a unique symbolic mode that is available to all. Indeed, both adult education and the place of music therein can lay claim to a long and distinguished historical partnership, and it is entirely appropriate that this should be so.

However, in common with all other educational transactions, such conjunctures do not occur politically in vacuo. Traditional liberal adult education was created to offer the widest possible learning experiences for all manner of people from different levels of society, but whereas the 1969 Russell report drew no sharp division between vocational and nonvocational study, the current prescriptive designation of adult education as `nonvocational study', the current prescriptive designation of adult education as `nonvocational', concerned with 'leisure', `recreation', or at best centred around a preoccupation with `personal development' has furthered the destruction of much of its overall coherence as a corpus of provision for all population groups and across an extensive curriculum terrain. For, whether it is basic education programmes, provision for the unemployed or vocational retraining, the disfiguring effect of such prioritising has been to exclude sizeable portions of traditional adult education not fitting the bill - regrettably, that can include music.

Since 19961 have run a course for adults unseriously entitled `Super singing for non-singers'; no doubt many others similar to mine exist around the country having a mandate to offer adults that allimportant `second chance' in their lives to hear and perform music. Come and see my students when the course begins each year, and then meet them when it's over; so discernible is the transformation that many of them continue to attend beyond the usual three terms. Could it be that at the heart of much that has been unthinkingly dismissed by the current ideology as being `merely non-vocational' lies the aim of personal and social integration?

It was sad to hear the Chancellor's cheap gibe on 9 March against such programmes in his budget speech, the derisive laughter from the House that accompanied his reference to `flying and diving' betraying the unquestioned assumption that individual recreational pursuit constitutes the sole rationale of a liberal adult education. It would seem that the equating of `individual personal development' with `social and economic progress' has been easy prey for politicians from both the present administration and their forebears in the New Right of the eighties; rampant, egotistical individualism as the mainstay of a competitive, market-dominated society has become the simple brutalisation of that liberal aspiration. Elsewhere, the final shreds of the progressive defence of adult education have been left in tatters by the consistent realignment of popular education as a social/technical priming for the market place.

Adult education has been left out in the cold for too long. I would be interestec to hear from readers having similar experiences in teaching adults and to know what other perspectives could be thrown on these matters.

Richard Staines Ipswich

Bradbury appeal

I am preparing an archive of the late Ernest Bradbury's writings for the Special Collection of the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds.

The collection includes cuttings from the Yorkshire Post, of which my husband was chief music critic from 1947 to 1984, writing also to both sides of these dates; and from The Listener, Radio Times, Time and Tide, and other regional and national newspapers including The Scotsman, Birmingham Post and Liverpool Daily Post, as well as the musical press. There are also broadcast scripts and concert programme notes for the BBC Proms, Three Choirs, Harrogate, York, Leeds and Edinburgh festivals, and individual concerts at other times.

If any reader has material of this nature written by my husband which they are prepared to part with or to photocopy, I should be most grateful to receive it and shall reimburse costs.

Susan Bradbury 9 Corring Way London NW11 7ED