‘A broadcasting university': educated citizenship and civil prudence

Abstract

This paper explores the political rationalities and discursive practices that epitomised adult education broadcasts in 1920's Britain. Taking as its keywords ‘citizenship’ and ‘educated democracy’, and its key practices as the dispassionate concern for truth and open debate, the paper will argue that early twentieth-century adult education, particularly as articulated in and through the BBC, was less concerned with the dissemination of knowledge than it was with endowing adult learners with new capacities for self-regulation so that they might better fulfil their newly acquired civic responsibilities following the long-awaited arrival of universal adult suffrage in 1918, whence adult learners were increasingly subjected to a series of self-governing, ethical obligations that are best characterised as ‘civil prudence’.