We All Need This

This is a book that I've read on many an occasion since it first inspired me a few years ago. I need to re-read it sometimes to remind me that there's more to life than my small world allows me.  I love the idea that passions lead us in ways that we don't always understand.

I've been very fortunate in my life to do something I love, and more fortunate to be surrounded by people who love what they do too. Of course there are a few people I meet who just trudge along, turning up at their work, giving nothing and receiving nothing in return-what sad lives they must lead.

I do what I do because I want to create a world full of Freds through adult learning and hope that maybe some day this country will understand just what its people have to offer, if we just give a little.  Spend a little to save and make a lot-it's not hard.  Maybe with the statement of ambition in adult learning we'll get the recognition we deserve.

Since I joined the national adult learners' forum I've never met anyone who had a bad word to say about adult learning, and I've met  few thousand in my lifetime so far. In fact the general public thinks that it delivers some of the most positive outcomes and changes in people's lives.  I've been hard pressed to meet anyone whose life it hasn't touched and changed even if its only through someone they know.

It's not hard to understand-it does what it says on the tin, so where is it when people need it most? Hiding away to avoid being cut in the next round of trimming, frightened to speak of its successes- apparently people's stories don't matter in this new brave world.

It doesn't matter that after 48 years of not being able to read and write that Jim can help his children with their homework; that at 82 Mhairi can keep in touch with her family and order her prescriptions and shopping online to save her home help shopping for her, or that John 42 now has a successful business despite having spent some time at her majesty's pleasure-all as a result of their involvement in adult learning (not my view this is their opinion) or what about Sandra at aged 52 who could finally take her children on holiday without her own father accompanying her to read for her.  I thought we were a 'proud' nation that believed in equality and that we had the 'best' education system.  If that's the case then let's show the rest of the UK that we do, rather than talk about it.

“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”  Eleanor Roosevelt

Come on Scotland we can if we believe we can!