Dear gair rhydd,
How could the Welsh Assembly Government with a clear conscience possibly approve cutting the teaching of Welsh, of all subjects, plus the Humanities at Cardiff Centre for Lifelong Learning?
Surely that would ride a coach and horses through their pledge to make the country more bilingual and to culturally enrich people, making us more enlightened and as aware of our Welsh heritage as responsible, active contributors with a heightened quality of life like that enjoyed by many of our neighbours within the European community.
On the WAG website it says: “We envisage wide participation in the full range of arts, cultural and sporting activities. Our aim is that high-quality cultural experiences are available to all people, irrespective of where they live or their background. We will celebrate and conserve Wales’s outstanding heritage, of ordinary people and well-known artists, alike.”
Thousands of “ordinary people” like me have benefited from classes at the Lifelong Learning Centre and a move to scrap all classes would deprive us of an opportunity to learn and develop as intelligent beings.
This is particularly worrying for mature unemployed people who look to the classes as a way of helping them to develop skills to make them more marketable in today’s frighteningly competitive job market.
The classes also fulfil a vital function as a way of maintaining mature people’s intellectual focus by disciplining themselves with regular study, thereby proving their worth to society, despite an apparent lack of meaningful interest by employers (particularly towards those of advancing years), and by regularly submitting work of a high standard to rigorous deadlines.
Many people are introduced to the demands of student life at the Lifelong Learning Centre and there they get the opportunity to learn new key transferable skills of researching using academic journals and the internet.
They grow and develop as new avenues and possibilities open up to them. Teaching and administrative staff at LLC have witnessed complete transformations in people’s lives from them perceiving themselves to be in the gutter to them seeing themselves soaring to the stars as a result of them taking up a class in their spare time.
Indeed, it was Oscar Wilde who wrote: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
Slashing classes in Humanities and Welsh would be a retrograde step for Wales and its cultural life, denying thousands more people the chance to aim upwards.
It would send out a clear message from the Welsh Assembly Government to the whole of Europe that we in Wales are happy in the gutter with nothing to aim for which would take us up out of our currently straitened circumstances.
