In the top left quadrant (A) come the effects which are familiar from ALW and other
accounts (though none the less stirring for their familiarity), where individuals have
changed their personal or professional lives by taking part in some form of adult
learning.
In the top right quadrant (B) we locate the kinds of effect that contribute to the
individual’s ability to sustain him or herself in a reasonable state of well-being or
health, physical or mental. We have many instances of individuals reporting to us that
without their class they would have lapsed into depression; or were already somewhat
depressed, as they now realise, but were first stopped from sliding further down and
then had their mental health improved (shifting them towards the left in the matrix).
But we refer here not only to the prevention of ill health but also to the maintenance to
positive forms of well-being, where learning enables people to continue to live
fulfilling and useful lives.
The more such an effect occurs amongst any given population, the more this benefit
spans the vertical axis and takes us down into the third quadrant (C), as the sustaining
effect on an individual contributes to the sustaining of a community’s mental health.
If we cannot speak exactly in those terms, i.e. of a community as such having levels of
health, since communities are made up of individuals, we can certainly speak of a
collective environment that is conducive to sustaining health. Sustaining the social
fabric goes far beyond straight issues of health, obviously. It can refer, for example, to
broad socialisation effects, as members of a community learn to understand each
other’s values and positions, and to communicate with each other. We cover some of
this in discussing tolerance and values in Section 8.
The fourth quadrant (D) refers to cases where learning has enabled or stimulated
social change. This may be through the agency of a single individual, or through
collective learning. The action may be focused on a specific issue, such as the
improvement of local schooling, or it may be more general. It is the transformation of
the collective environment, or features of it, that counts here. Our evidence includes a
variety of instances of activism, bearing in mind that the term ‘community activist’
has connotations that many of those whom we might place in this category for the
purposes of this analysis would reject. We are dealing not only with people who think
of themselves as activists but also those who are engaged in bringing about change
but in a more gradualist, less publicly prominent way.
It is important to stress that both dimensions are continua; in a world of constant
change it is not always obvious where sustaining stops and transformation begins.
Moreover, individuals’ learning cannot always be neatly located within the matrix,
especially as the nature of their learning may change over time.
All the categories identified through this matrix can contain negative effects, though
in some cases this is harder to imagine than others. Thus learning may unhealthily
inhibit individuals from change, confirming them in their current roles. Or it may
bring about social transformation, but of a kind that is damaging (quadrant 4) - there
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