Home and Away: The Decline of Informal Learning in South Wales, 1900-1997. Patterns of Participation in Adult Education and Training. Working Paper 13.

This study is part of a regional study in industrial South Wales on the determinants of participation and non-participation in post-compulsory education and training, with special reference to processes of change in the patterns of these determinants over time and to variations between geographical areas. The study combines contextual analysis of secondary data about education and training providers with a regional study of several generations of families in South Wales (a door-to-door survey of 1,104 representative householders), semi-structured interviews, and taped oral histories conducted in 1996-97. This study begins by questioning the narrow definition of learning used in much present writing concerning lifelong learning, which tends to focus on the purported economic and societal benefits of prolonging and widening participation in formal education and training programs. In contrast, much valuable learning already goes on, and has always gone on, outside formal programs of instruction, both at work and at leisure. The study concludes that if such informal learning continues to be ignored by proponents of a learning society, as it has been by the authors of the recent green papers, for example, then the result will be an unnecessary exclusiveness in definitions of a learning society and an unjustifiable reliance on certification. (Contains 24 references.) (KC)