Adult education in developing countries

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Adult education in developing countries, with special reference to the role of universities

John Bowers, Agricultural Extension and Rural Development Centre, University of Reading

Definitions

UNESCO has just completed a five-year project to develop an International Standard Classification of Education[1]. It includes two definitions which I should like to quote. It defines ‘Education’ as ‘organised and sustained communication designed to bring about learning’. It then defines ‘Adult Education’, which is regarded as a synonym for ‘Out-of-school Education’, as ‘education designed for the benefit and adapted to the needs of persons not enrolled in regular school and university education and generally aged 15 years and older’. These definitions are strictly for statisticians but I find some merit in them and I propose to look at adult education as a system of organised and sustained communication which aims to help people outside the school and university system to acquire information, knowledge, understanding, skills and capabilities.

Still within the realm of definitions, I shall adopt UNESCO’s usage of the terms ‘formal’ and ‘non-formal’, although this differs from current British and American terminology. So I shall use the term ‘formal adult education’ for programmes in which students are enrolled or registered to follow pre-arranged courses of study and ‘non-formal’ for those in which they are not - for example, agricultural extension, community development and many mass media programmes.

‘Developing’ Countries: some relevant characteristics

I am concerned with the ‘developing world’, but let me express my sympathy with the article by Geraldine Norman in The Times of 26 May: ‘Introducing the hedonometer, a new way of assessing national performance’ or ‘Why we should measure happiness instead of income’. We are all well aware of the economic analyses of ‘less developed’, ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries; nevertheless I want to pick out three characteristics of the first group which seem specially relevant to my subject:

  • the multiplicity of languages;
  • the high incidence of adult illiteracy;
  • the high percentages of the population living in rural areas and working in agriculture.

Most obviously, these three characteristics suggest that adult education in developing countries:

  • must be involved with language policy and language teaching;
  • must cater for total illiterates and semi-literates, as well as for those who have been subjected to varying degrees of schooling;
  • must provide educational support for rural development.

Less obviously, all three characteristics combine to create language and culture gaps between the educated elite and the mass of population. I see it as a crucial function of adult education to bridge these gaps and to ensure that there is a two-way flow of traffic across the bridges - to ensure that the mass of the population is not only ‘taught’ and ‘trained’ but also heard and listened to. So I want to emphasise two-way communication and ‘feedback’ as essential features of adult education.

Adult Education Systems: Planning and Improvement

I spoke of adult education as 'a system of organised communication’. The reality is rather a variety of systems, managed by a multiplicity of departments and agencies, within the Government structure and outside it. In Diagram I, I include a crude model, which may be sufficiently suggestive of a typical - or perhaps ideal - adult education system to serve my purpose. This purpose is two-fold: first to consider some possible improvements in traditional systems and secondly to put forward some ideas of the role of universities in bringing these about.

Although a diversity of systems, and free competition, may make for healthy growth in adult education, developing countries cannot afford too much dispersal of scarce resources; so the first steps to improvement may be:

  • a survey of existing provision, as called for in the UNESCO ‘Manual on the Collection of Statistics for Adult Education’;
  • a minimum of national planning to fill the gaps in the pattern of systems and encourage co-ordination (as was attempted without conspicuous success by the creation of the Adult Education Board in Kenya);
  • programme planning within each system to determine who should communicate what, to whom, why, when, where and how.

Planning education should no longer mean planning school systems. A ‘continuing education’ plan should also aim to improve the quality and the scope of learning opportunities for adults, through ‘non-formal’ services reaching out to the people (especially in rural areas) and ‘formal’ courses of face-to-face and distance education for which students can enrol according to their needs - from functional literacy to post-graduate studies.

Related to such planning in multi-lingual areas, there should be a clear language policy, determining what languages should be used for what purposes in adult education. This is, of course, an emotive issue and often depends upon political decisions at the highest level. Language policy might lead on to more and better language teaching, often related to functional literacy.

Let us certainly plan education for happiness - ‘hedonogogy’(?) - as well as for income. Nevertheless the more functional areas of adult education - agricultural extension, vocational training, health education, functional literacy - should be co-ordinated with development. One important way of doing this will be through the media-production service dealt with in the next section.

Media Production

To me the most important element in any adult education programme, and the one most often needing improvement, is the component with the number seven in my model - The Media Production Service (see Diagram 1).

Notwithstanding the advantages of face-to-face communication, there is a high rate of information loss and distortion in the unaided use of the spoken word. As T.S. Eliot put it: ‘Dust in the air suspended marks the place where a story ended’ - and to parody his next line: ‘words in an over-loaded mind are all bad lectures leave behind’. This is especially so where teachers have traditional training and where culture gaps separate them from learners. Improved training may help but I would also plead for better media to reinforce adult educators, whoever they are and wherever they work, with good manuals and teaching aids. I would also bring to the adult education battlefront more of the long-range artillery of correspondence courses, self-teaching materials, reading matter and radio programmes, supporting the front line infantry of teachers, instructors and extension workers.

My media service has three intersecting circles. The largest contains the professional communicators - writers, illustrators, film and radio men - the creative core of a multi-media production unit. The second circle brings in the ‘subject-matter specialists’ introduced into the system, as occasion demands, to provide technical knowledge content. They decide what should be communicated, the communicators determine

Reproduced from 1975 Conference Proceedings  SCUTREA 1996

Adult education in developing countries

Reproduced from 1975 Conference Proceedings  SCUTREA 1996

Adult education in developing cou

how. Where there is a culture gap to be bridged specialists generally need to be ‘interpreted’ to ‘target populations’ or learners by trained communicators. Indeed it is generally sound policy not to let the specialists communicate direct with the consumers. Finally a small Evaluation and Action Research (EAR) unit - (the third circle) - a rare but, to me, a crucial element in the media production service provides essential data and feed-back from the target population. The unit will study the problems, needs, knowledge, attitudes and practices of the target population and their language habits and levels of literacy, pre-test the media to improve their communication and eventually evaluate their effect. The initials EAR have a double significance, for it is the listening unit in a talking system.

The storage and distribution of ‘software’ and the maintenance of ‘hardware’ are handled by a separate unit (number 6 in my model). You do not confuse the functions of the factory and the retailer, nor should you clutter creative media producers with administrative chores.

Universities in Adult Education

What then should be the role of universities in adult education? Let me first put forward a personal view on what should not be their role. Here I risk offending those who see it as the duty of the Universities in developing countries to respond to the needs of all kinds of people for all kinds of education. Whilst it appears essential to reduce the culture gap between the increasingly urbanised elite and the mass of the population by involving university staff and students in communities, especially rural communities, and in the problems of their development, this does not necessarily imply that the universities should manage, staff or finance all sorts of adult education systems, rural development schemes, demonstration and pilot projects, extension services, literacy campaigns and second-chance, second-level education programmes.

How then should they be involved? I suggest: mainly by contributing their knowledge, expertise and personnel to supporting services. I confine myself to a list of contributions which seem to me crucial to adult education in developing countries and appropriate to universities and other university-level institutions.

  • Direct provision of extra-mural adult education, but only at the university level - to enrich individual lives and local culture and to up-date knowledge and develop competence in government, the professions and industry - through Open University and other part-time programmes.
  • Involvement in the Planning of Adult Education, in relation with development and with the school system.
  • Studies, Research and Evaluation in the areas and relationships listed above - research feeding into training.
  • Research in the Social Sciences, (e.g. linguistics, communication, psychology, sociology, economics etc.) feeding into the policy, methodology and technology of adult education.
  • Research (Basic and Applied) in the Natural Sciences, which will feed the raw material of technology through the digestive system of adult education into society.
  • Involvement in Media Production for Adult Education, especially by providing subject-matter specialists to assist the interpretation and digestion of technology into educational packages - and their ‘validation’ through action research and testing.
  • Teaching/Training in Research, Evaluation and Action Research for personnel in adult education and related programmes.
  • Teaching/Training, at university level, for managers, supervisors and teacher-trainers in adult education.
  • Teaching/Training in adult education and communication, at university level, for people not usually regarded as adult educators (e.g.: doctors, engineers, administrators) within their regular courses and in short courses, workshops and seminars.
  • Consultancy and Documentation Services, feeding into adult education agencies through person-to-person communication and documentation: e.g. research reports, translated, where necessary, and expressed in layman’s language and operational terms.

Each of these functions is a subject for detailed debate; together they contribute to my general contention that Universities should be involved in adult education not so much in operating popular education systems but more in providing intellectual support to other operating agencies. By research related to high-level training they can help the operators to analyse and understand the complex processes of human communication and learning and the even more complex problems of development and to acquire and apply technologies that are up-to-date and appropriate.

A University Department or Institute of Adult Education should serve to make these services more systematic and appropriate. The relationship of adult education with regular school education and of both with development should be reflected in an operational relationship between an Institute of Adult Education, an Institute of School Education and an Institute of Development Studies. The Adult Education Institute can draw together the expertise from various faculties in the University and beam it into operative systems of adult education through professional support in planning, evaluation and research, teaching and training, conferences and seminars, consultancy and documentation. It can also beam back to the universities the needs and problems of the adult educators. So I see the Adult Education Institute providing a two-way channel of communication between the Universities and adult education systems. On a larger scale, I see adult education systems providing two-way channels between the universities and the population. Adult educators and their media producers will constrain research workers to clarify and verify their ideas and technologies, for onward communication to the consumers. Equally adult education systems must establish a return channel, feeding back to the research workers problems needing further study, as well as the effects of technology in various environments and societies - so adult education may help to bridge the gaps between the intellectuals and the population at large and encourage the two-way traffic of ideas across the bridges.

Reproduced from 1975 Conference Proceedings  SCUTREA 1996

[1]UNESCO, ISCEd, Manual for the Collection of Adult Education Statistics, CSR/E/15 June 1975, Office of Statistics, UNESCO, Paris