ADULT EDUCATION AND THE UNDER-PRIVILEGED.

The article focuses on the concept of education for underprivileged people. It has become fashionable to contend in an affluent society, within which it is possible for mine workers and for semi skilled operatives in the car industry to earn not much less than professional workers, that there are now no sections of the community to whom the term under privileged can be applied. But, it is not the reality. Whilst it is true that the children of manual workers do now enjoy slightly more opportunities to take advantage of grammar school and university education, in many other respects the inequalities between manual and non-manual workers have diminished hardly at all. Indeed the provision of further education facilities for the already educationally favoured groups makes it all the more difficult for the industrial manual worker to gain promotion within the firm to which he is attached. On the one hand, life is being made more exciting and more stimulating for certain specialist groups of workers and for them further education and industrial training is seen as a challenge and a means to attain a higher status in the industrial organization. But for the mass of workers in an economically advanced community, there are signs that their absorption in the process of automation is leading to a corroding of their sensitivities.