EDUCATION FOR AN AGE OF PLENTY 153

Education, which will help us to preserve democracy and to
assure its further progress by mobilizing the will to constructive
social effort, has urgent need for knowledge about the growth
of social classes and the aspirations of citizens at different social
levels. The professors of economic tautology in our universities
cannot give answers to the questions we put. Their Marxist critics
offer us a barren dialectic of social classes when our need is for
factual analysis of social structure and social behaviour. It seems
that the Adult Education Movement has only one course if it is
to discharge a creative function in the Age of Potential Plenty
and to meet the challenge of dictatorships to democratic ideals
in education. We must not be'content to take from the universities
the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table. We must not
turn a disillusioned ear to doctrinaire Marxism. We must ask
ourselves what kind of knowledge we need if we wish to equip
ourselves for the task of organizing the social exploitation of the
new resources which science has pkced at our disposal. In so far
as the universities can provide men who have this knowledge
we must welcome their co-operation. In so far as men with a
university training can seek this knowledge we must encourage
their efforts. In so far as the universities have failed to do so we
must subject university teaching to vigorous and outspoken
criticism.

In the past there have been two movements for adult education
among die working classes of this country. One, the W.E.A.,
has been too content to let the universities dictate its policy. The
other, represented by the Central Labour Colleges, has carried
on its work with very little assistance from people with a highly
specialized training. The orientation of the policy for which I
plead differs from that of both.

The universities have vast resources of knowledge. Much of
their work in training doctors, engineers, chemists, and the like
would be carried out in very much the same way in any rationally
organized society. So the criticisms which have been levelled
against the universities in some quarters have been often ill-
informed and far too sweeping. Well-merited criticisms which