Developments & Difference in Adult and Non-Formal Education
14 min read
It seems to me that there have been significant developments in three main areas which have important implications for policy and practice.
ADULT LITERACY
A New Interest in Adult Literacy: The World Bank and several other donor agencies have shown signs recently of revived interest in adult literacy. Two major reports (Beloisya 1999 and Jon Lauglo 2002) point the way inside World Bank, but there are other organisations reconsidering the contribution of adult literacy to Education for All.
Such developments are however taking place within a growing awareness that the older approaches of adult literacy campaigns have failed to be effective, and a search is being conducted for new ways of working. Although the old-fashioned claims for adult literacy as a panacea for all ills (for cheating, for school drop-outs or non-enrolments, for poverty, for ill health, for over-population etc) are still being sounded by several agencies ("Literacy is the key to health, wealth and happiness" as UNESCO only very recently pronounced), there is growing research to demonstrate that literacy does not automatically lead to better health, lower fertility and increased incomes, let alone cognitive changes.
Nevertheless, although there is scepticism about the causal links between adult literacy and immediate developmental benefits; and despite the growing recognition that earlier attempts to promote adult literacy have almost everywhere been a failure (increases in national literacy statistics are almost certainly the result of increased primary schooling, not adult literacy campaigns), there is a growing interest in promoting adult literacy in almost every one of the so-called 'developing' countries.
These policy changes however are taking place within one of two quite different contexts. On the one hand, there is a great concern to build systems of more comprehensive basic education for adults, largely but not solely on grounds of equality and human rights (for example, Torres 2002). On the other hand, in place of a narrow economicism, many agencies and others seek to encourage the promotion of sustainable and secure livelihoods (Oxenham 2002 and DFID 2001).
This growing interest is also taking place in a context in which the world of adult literacy has seen major changes in recent years.
The New Literacy Studies: What have come to be called the New Literacy Studies have in fact been under discussion since the late 1970s - but it is only recently that they have come to be more widely accepted and the implications of these new insights, based as they are on substantial research, are being explored.
The older view - that literacy is a basic skill, fundamental to all further learning and development (a view widely proclaimed especially by UNESCO with its very recently reasserted doctrine that "Literacy is the Key to Development"); that it is a universal and neutral skill best taught by a universal learning programme similar to that used in primary schools; that learning literacy brings with it automatically a range of cognitive changes and understanding - has for a long time been challenged. Even Freire saw that literacy is intimately bound up with local power systems, although he saw it a tool of liberation.
The New Literacy Studies - coming from two distinct but parallel sources, anthropology and adult learning - argue that there are different kinds of literacy (for example, religious literacy, such as reading the Koran, is a genuine literacy but it does not provide access to other texts within those societies); that when we teach one form of literacy, we are in fact accepting and indeed promoting a particular status quo at the expense of more informal literacies - what are sometimes called a dominant or school-based literacy as against "local literacies"; and that therefore we need to understand the local context to the particular literacy group we are working with, to use their existing literacy practices and tasks and the real texts which exist within their own society as the basis of learning literacy skills, rather than assume that a one-size learning programme with a formal common textbook (primer) will fit all groups of literacy learners. The New Literacy Studies argue that literacy is not neutral - it is inevitably tied up with power, with gender and other social constructs.
Learning literacy on its own brings no benefits - it is only when literacy skills are being used within a particular context for a particular purpose that any benefits (development) can be seen. Although in general the New Literacy Studies do not interest themselves in pedagogical concerns, those working in adult education agree that all adult literacy learning programmes need to be built on the specific rather than the generalised literacy practices of the literacy learners; and thus researching such practices is essential for the development of new adult literacy learning programmes.
This approach has at last begun to percolate through into practice. DFID has built a major project in Nepal on an understanding of local literacies; and its latest technical note on literacy (DFID 2002) is based on the concepts of the New Literacy Studies. Even UNESCO is beginning to crack. The EFA Global Monitoring Report recognises there has been a change in the way what counts as being literate is now to be seen:
"The meaning of literacy has developed radically since the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien in 1990. Conceived now in the plural as "literacies", and embedded in a range of life and livelihood situations, literacy differs according to purpose, context, use, script and institutional framework acquired" (UNESCO, 2002:17).
"Literacy is no longer seen as a singular concept, but rather as plural "literacies". These literacies differ according to purpose, context, use, script, language and institutional framework. As individuals we all use multiple literacies- for example, for work, for personal matters, in different languages, and so on. Within any community there will be a range of literacies - understanding what these are and how they are structured is important for negotiating whether and how literacy might be acquired"(UNESCO, 2002:60).
There are still major problems to be faced. Perhaps the most important is the question of the basis of the evaluation of literacy in terms of statistics. The numbers of literate and illiterate members of society based on attendance at learning programmes is thus called into question. And this raises the issue of targets being set (as in the Global Monitoring Report which suggests new statistical targets for 2015).
How to define "literate" in the light of the New Literacy Studies is a question to which much attention needs to be given; especially if the primary objective is not the numbers of persons who learn literacy skills but the numbers who use literacy skills and for what purposes. If out of an adult literacy learning group of 30 persons, some 25 persons complete the course but if after six months only ten are using their newly acquired skills, is the required target the 25 learners or the 10 users?
Again, what kind of uses are acceptable? If (as in Brazil recently) it is found that new literacy learners are using their skills for reading fashion magazines and writing Christmas cards, is this acceptable criteria for measuring statistical achievements? Much more attention needs to be given as to how to compile data in statistical form relating to the uses of literacy skills.
And secondly far more attention needs to be given to the role of the literacy facilitators and their training and on-going support than we have given in the past. If it is important to build adult literacy learning programmes on the existing "real" literacy practices and tasks of the individual learners rather than on generalised "needs" of whole categories of persons (such as women or fisherfolk etc), what does this imply for the selection, initial training and on-going support of the literacy teachers? These people are the most neglected of all educational development workers; they never feature in any Ministry of Education statistics and their (unqualified) training is rarely if ever given serious consideration.
Literacy and Livelihoods: There is a second and parallel trend in adult literacy today, which is best summed up under the heading of Literacy for Livelihoods or Literacy and Livelihoods. Many people have seen a use for literacy - literacy for health, for income-generation, for citizenship, for environmental development etc.
All of these however have seen such outcomes as arising after the learning of literacy - that once a person or group has developed literacy skills, they can then learn more about health, engage more effectively in income generation or citizenship activities etc. The Literacy and Livelihoods approach is different - and significantly so.
This approach suggests that literacy skills are best developed through livelihood development programmes (seen in its widest connotation, not just as income-generation), using the texts and tasks of secure and sustainable livelihood activities for learning literacy.
The key approach here is the "literacy comes second" approach. That is, local groups or individuals are encouraged to begin to work on some personal or community developmental programme and through that activity develop their literacy skills. This is in sharp contrast to the "literacy comes first" approach of those who assert that without literacy there is no development, that literacy is a pre-requisite to development.
However, the real significance of the Literacy through Livelihoods movement has probably not yet been fully grasped. For this new approach detaches adult literacy from the educational sector and locates it firmly in social and economic development activities. A Literacy and Livelihoods programme will look significantly different from an adult literacy class. For example, it will start with a non-literacy activity. Its group will not be solely non-literates but a mixture of persons with varying ranges of literacy skills. Its facilitators will be or include non-educationalist trainers. And the assessment of success will not be based on the numbers who learned literacy skills but on the achievements in terms of livelihoods.
Is adult literacy education or social development? Even apart from the Literacy and Livelihoods movement (which is now prevalent in most policy and practice statements), there is a deep fault line which runs right through adult literacy today - between those who see literacy in terms of education (whether children's, fundamental, basic or adult education) and those who see it in terms of social or other development. The deciding factor can be seen in what follows from the initial adult literacy classes.
Is the aim to lead onto to further learning, to "continuing education centres" with what are called adult "equivalency" programmes? In which case the basis is that of education, and literacy is a tool for further learning programmes. Or is the aim to lead onto to community, group or individual action for socio-economic enhancement? In which case literacy is a tool of social development. This is at the heart of current debates about where adult literacy is going today. It is an exciting time for literacy in development.
NON-FORMAL EDUCATION
The trends in non-formal education (NFE) can be discussed much more briefly. NFE is back on the agenda - it is becoming big in many countries. But it has largely abandoned the earlier approach of individualised contextualised participatory education for different groups and has largely (though not entirely) settled down to become "flexible schooling".
Here the educational interests have become dominant. Non-formal schools for out-of-school youth such as street children; equivalency programmes for adults who have never been in formal schools or who never 'completed' their formal schooling; vocational training centres (including elements of citizenship training) for adolescents to continue their schooling and gain recognised qualifications are springing up in country after country.
Meeting places, times of meeting, and the appointment of teachers are all more informal than in formal schooling. But the limits to the non-formality are often very narrow. Although it is claimed these are "participatory" schools, with local interest groups determining some features of the programme through parents or village education committees etc, such matters of local control are confined to the less important aspects such as the times of class sessions, the location of the building, the holidays.
It does not extend to the curriculum which is almost always controlled and centralised; it does not extend to the length of the teaching programme or the textbooks. Such matters are determined by central authorities who are led by their desire to develop qualifications equivalent to those of formal schooling.
NFE then has come back to help the efforts of many countries to achieve their EFA targets. Both formal schools and NFE are needed if we are to provide Education for All. But today EFA is simply that - Education (i.e. schooling) for All. It is not Learning for All.
The difference between education and learning in this context is that education is controlled by someone other than the learner, while learning is controlled by the learner. Someone (who?) has decided that every person, child and adult alike, must receive someone else's idea of Education, for without that 'Education', development will not take place.
The same fault line occurs in NFE, between seeing NFE as flexible schooling, part of the educational sector, or more informally, as part of social development. But whereas social development has won in the adult literacy field, schooling has won in the NFE field. Perhaps a truly developmental form of NFE will require it to separate its links with "education" (schooling) and become more truly immediate and participatory.
ADULT EDUCATION
Again we can outline the major trends in adult education relatively briefly although the literature in this field is enormous. Two major developments seem to have taken place, both closely linked.
Adult learning is unique? The first is that the uniqueness of adult learning is being challenged. In the 1980s, we were all very certain that adults learned in a different way from children and therefore they needed special forms of education which we called andragogy, not pedagogy. Now we are not so sure.
After hundreds of books on adult learning, there seems to be a growing consensus that - although there are some features of adult learning which remain distinctive such as the adults' different range of experience and perhaps some adult developmental stages to follow after the Piagetian stages of childhood and youth - on the whole adults learn in much the same ways as younger persons do.
What are not being explored so much are the relationships inherent in the teacher-learner encounter that constitutes education: whether these relationships may be of such a significant difference that the whole matter of teaching adults is different from the teaching of children.
Lifelong Learning/Education: This becomes important because of the second trend in adult education today - the rise of lifelong learning. The discourse of lifelong learning or lifelong education (the two terms are frequently confused) is everywhere, and this will become increasingly important in development circles as awareness increases that modern societies today are built on knowledge rather than on labour skills and that knowledge management is the current organisational fashion for all healthy and growing economies. Vocational training in development is changing from skill development to knowledge control, to learning how to learn.
For on the whole LLL has come to mean education for, in and through work rather than truly lifelong learning (almost the only gesture made to non-work lifelong learning is that for older (retired) persons such as the University of the Third Age).
The earlier programmes of adult education for, in and through social organisations such as the trades unions or more recently social movements such as women's movements or environmental and residents' groups remain but are a very minor element in lifelong education. Indeed, the key element of LLL is not community-based learning programmes but rather a two-fold trend of
Both are driven by qualificationism and the commodification of learning programmes. Both ignore or demean the natural learning that goes on outside formalised learning programmes. Once again, as with NFE, formal education (schooling) has taken over adult education and seeks to make it more like itself. LLL has fallen into the educational rather than the social development sector. True lifelong learning will not be controlled by education (schooling) but will take its stand on the social development side of the fault line.
CONCLUSION
There are times when I feel relatively optimistic - hoping that we are seeing cyclical trends, and that a more localised, less qualificatory form of adult and non-formal education will return. There are other times when I wonder whether we have turned a corner permanently and that the old battles have been lost for ever. Others than myself will see whether the future lies with the more contextualised, more participatory forms of learning which adult literacy is enjoying as it becomes divorced from its educational background, or whether formal schooling with its overemphasis on qualifications will continue to dominate even in adult and non-formal education.
ADULT LITERACY
A New Interest in Adult Literacy: The World Bank and several other donor agencies have shown signs recently of revived interest in adult literacy. Two major reports (Beloisya 1999 and Jon Lauglo 2002) point the way inside World Bank, but there are other organisations reconsidering the contribution of adult literacy to Education for All.
Such developments are however taking place within a growing awareness that the older approaches of adult literacy campaigns have failed to be effective, and a search is being conducted for new ways of working. Although the old-fashioned claims for adult literacy as a panacea for all ills (for cheating, for school drop-outs or non-enrolments, for poverty, for ill health, for over-population etc) are still being sounded by several agencies ("Literacy is the key to health, wealth and happiness" as UNESCO only very recently pronounced), there is growing research to demonstrate that literacy does not automatically lead to better health, lower fertility and increased incomes, let alone cognitive changes.
Nevertheless, although there is scepticism about the causal links between adult literacy and immediate developmental benefits; and despite the growing recognition that earlier attempts to promote adult literacy have almost everywhere been a failure (increases in national literacy statistics are almost certainly the result of increased primary schooling, not adult literacy campaigns), there is a growing interest in promoting adult literacy in almost every one of the so-called 'developing' countries.
These policy changes however are taking place within one of two quite different contexts. On the one hand, there is a great concern to build systems of more comprehensive basic education for adults, largely but not solely on grounds of equality and human rights (for example, Torres 2002). On the other hand, in place of a narrow economicism, many agencies and others seek to encourage the promotion of sustainable and secure livelihoods (Oxenham 2002 and DFID 2001).
This growing interest is also taking place in a context in which the world of adult literacy has seen major changes in recent years.
The New Literacy Studies: What have come to be called the New Literacy Studies have in fact been under discussion since the late 1970s - but it is only recently that they have come to be more widely accepted and the implications of these new insights, based as they are on substantial research, are being explored.
The older view - that literacy is a basic skill, fundamental to all further learning and development (a view widely proclaimed especially by UNESCO with its very recently reasserted doctrine that "Literacy is the Key to Development"); that it is a universal and neutral skill best taught by a universal learning programme similar to that used in primary schools; that learning literacy brings with it automatically a range of cognitive changes and understanding - has for a long time been challenged. Even Freire saw that literacy is intimately bound up with local power systems, although he saw it a tool of liberation.
The New Literacy Studies - coming from two distinct but parallel sources, anthropology and adult learning - argue that there are different kinds of literacy (for example, religious literacy, such as reading the Koran, is a genuine literacy but it does not provide access to other texts within those societies); that when we teach one form of literacy, we are in fact accepting and indeed promoting a particular status quo at the expense of more informal literacies - what are sometimes called a dominant or school-based literacy as against "local literacies"; and that therefore we need to understand the local context to the particular literacy group we are working with, to use their existing literacy practices and tasks and the real texts which exist within their own society as the basis of learning literacy skills, rather than assume that a one-size learning programme with a formal common textbook (primer) will fit all groups of literacy learners. The New Literacy Studies argue that literacy is not neutral - it is inevitably tied up with power, with gender and other social constructs.
Learning literacy on its own brings no benefits - it is only when literacy skills are being used within a particular context for a particular purpose that any benefits (development) can be seen. Although in general the New Literacy Studies do not interest themselves in pedagogical concerns, those working in adult education agree that all adult literacy learning programmes need to be built on the specific rather than the generalised literacy practices of the literacy learners; and thus researching such practices is essential for the development of new adult literacy learning programmes.
This approach has at last begun to percolate through into practice. DFID has built a major project in Nepal on an understanding of local literacies; and its latest technical note on literacy (DFID 2002) is based on the concepts of the New Literacy Studies. Even UNESCO is beginning to crack. The EFA Global Monitoring Report recognises there has been a change in the way what counts as being literate is now to be seen:
"The meaning of literacy has developed radically since the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien in 1990. Conceived now in the plural as "literacies", and embedded in a range of life and livelihood situations, literacy differs according to purpose, context, use, script and institutional framework acquired" (UNESCO, 2002:17).
"Literacy is no longer seen as a singular concept, but rather as plural "literacies". These literacies differ according to purpose, context, use, script, language and institutional framework. As individuals we all use multiple literacies- for example, for work, for personal matters, in different languages, and so on. Within any community there will be a range of literacies - understanding what these are and how they are structured is important for negotiating whether and how literacy might be acquired"(UNESCO, 2002:60).
There are still major problems to be faced. Perhaps the most important is the question of the basis of the evaluation of literacy in terms of statistics. The numbers of literate and illiterate members of society based on attendance at learning programmes is thus called into question. And this raises the issue of targets being set (as in the Global Monitoring Report which suggests new statistical targets for 2015).
How to define "literate" in the light of the New Literacy Studies is a question to which much attention needs to be given; especially if the primary objective is not the numbers of persons who learn literacy skills but the numbers who use literacy skills and for what purposes. If out of an adult literacy learning group of 30 persons, some 25 persons complete the course but if after six months only ten are using their newly acquired skills, is the required target the 25 learners or the 10 users?
Again, what kind of uses are acceptable? If (as in Brazil recently) it is found that new literacy learners are using their skills for reading fashion magazines and writing Christmas cards, is this acceptable criteria for measuring statistical achievements? Much more attention needs to be given as to how to compile data in statistical form relating to the uses of literacy skills.
And secondly far more attention needs to be given to the role of the literacy facilitators and their training and on-going support than we have given in the past. If it is important to build adult literacy learning programmes on the existing "real" literacy practices and tasks of the individual learners rather than on generalised "needs" of whole categories of persons (such as women or fisherfolk etc), what does this imply for the selection, initial training and on-going support of the literacy teachers? These people are the most neglected of all educational development workers; they never feature in any Ministry of Education statistics and their (unqualified) training is rarely if ever given serious consideration.
Literacy and Livelihoods: There is a second and parallel trend in adult literacy today, which is best summed up under the heading of Literacy for Livelihoods or Literacy and Livelihoods. Many people have seen a use for literacy - literacy for health, for income-generation, for citizenship, for environmental development etc.
All of these however have seen such outcomes as arising after the learning of literacy - that once a person or group has developed literacy skills, they can then learn more about health, engage more effectively in income generation or citizenship activities etc. The Literacy and Livelihoods approach is different - and significantly so.
This approach suggests that literacy skills are best developed through livelihood development programmes (seen in its widest connotation, not just as income-generation), using the texts and tasks of secure and sustainable livelihood activities for learning literacy.
The key approach here is the "literacy comes second" approach. That is, local groups or individuals are encouraged to begin to work on some personal or community developmental programme and through that activity develop their literacy skills. This is in sharp contrast to the "literacy comes first" approach of those who assert that without literacy there is no development, that literacy is a pre-requisite to development.
However, the real significance of the Literacy through Livelihoods movement has probably not yet been fully grasped. For this new approach detaches adult literacy from the educational sector and locates it firmly in social and economic development activities. A Literacy and Livelihoods programme will look significantly different from an adult literacy class. For example, it will start with a non-literacy activity. Its group will not be solely non-literates but a mixture of persons with varying ranges of literacy skills. Its facilitators will be or include non-educationalist trainers. And the assessment of success will not be based on the numbers who learned literacy skills but on the achievements in terms of livelihoods.
Is adult literacy education or social development? Even apart from the Literacy and Livelihoods movement (which is now prevalent in most policy and practice statements), there is a deep fault line which runs right through adult literacy today - between those who see literacy in terms of education (whether children's, fundamental, basic or adult education) and those who see it in terms of social or other development. The deciding factor can be seen in what follows from the initial adult literacy classes.
Is the aim to lead onto to further learning, to "continuing education centres" with what are called adult "equivalency" programmes? In which case the basis is that of education, and literacy is a tool for further learning programmes. Or is the aim to lead onto to community, group or individual action for socio-economic enhancement? In which case literacy is a tool of social development. This is at the heart of current debates about where adult literacy is going today. It is an exciting time for literacy in development.
NON-FORMAL EDUCATION
The trends in non-formal education (NFE) can be discussed much more briefly. NFE is back on the agenda - it is becoming big in many countries. But it has largely abandoned the earlier approach of individualised contextualised participatory education for different groups and has largely (though not entirely) settled down to become "flexible schooling".
Here the educational interests have become dominant. Non-formal schools for out-of-school youth such as street children; equivalency programmes for adults who have never been in formal schools or who never 'completed' their formal schooling; vocational training centres (including elements of citizenship training) for adolescents to continue their schooling and gain recognised qualifications are springing up in country after country.
Meeting places, times of meeting, and the appointment of teachers are all more informal than in formal schooling. But the limits to the non-formality are often very narrow. Although it is claimed these are "participatory" schools, with local interest groups determining some features of the programme through parents or village education committees etc, such matters of local control are confined to the less important aspects such as the times of class sessions, the location of the building, the holidays.
It does not extend to the curriculum which is almost always controlled and centralised; it does not extend to the length of the teaching programme or the textbooks. Such matters are determined by central authorities who are led by their desire to develop qualifications equivalent to those of formal schooling.
NFE then has come back to help the efforts of many countries to achieve their EFA targets. Both formal schools and NFE are needed if we are to provide Education for All. But today EFA is simply that - Education (i.e. schooling) for All. It is not Learning for All.
The difference between education and learning in this context is that education is controlled by someone other than the learner, while learning is controlled by the learner. Someone (who?) has decided that every person, child and adult alike, must receive someone else's idea of Education, for without that 'Education', development will not take place.
The same fault line occurs in NFE, between seeing NFE as flexible schooling, part of the educational sector, or more informally, as part of social development. But whereas social development has won in the adult literacy field, schooling has won in the NFE field. Perhaps a truly developmental form of NFE will require it to separate its links with "education" (schooling) and become more truly immediate and participatory.
ADULT EDUCATION
Again we can outline the major trends in adult education relatively briefly although the literature in this field is enormous. Two major developments seem to have taken place, both closely linked.
Adult learning is unique? The first is that the uniqueness of adult learning is being challenged. In the 1980s, we were all very certain that adults learned in a different way from children and therefore they needed special forms of education which we called andragogy, not pedagogy. Now we are not so sure.
After hundreds of books on adult learning, there seems to be a growing consensus that - although there are some features of adult learning which remain distinctive such as the adults' different range of experience and perhaps some adult developmental stages to follow after the Piagetian stages of childhood and youth - on the whole adults learn in much the same ways as younger persons do.
What are not being explored so much are the relationships inherent in the teacher-learner encounter that constitutes education: whether these relationships may be of such a significant difference that the whole matter of teaching adults is different from the teaching of children.
Lifelong Learning/Education: This becomes important because of the second trend in adult education today - the rise of lifelong learning. The discourse of lifelong learning or lifelong education (the two terms are frequently confused) is everywhere, and this will become increasingly important in development circles as awareness increases that modern societies today are built on knowledge rather than on labour skills and that knowledge management is the current organisational fashion for all healthy and growing economies. Vocational training in development is changing from skill development to knowledge control, to learning how to learn.
For on the whole LLL has come to mean education for, in and through work rather than truly lifelong learning (almost the only gesture made to non-work lifelong learning is that for older (retired) persons such as the University of the Third Age).
The earlier programmes of adult education for, in and through social organisations such as the trades unions or more recently social movements such as women's movements or environmental and residents' groups remain but are a very minor element in lifelong education. Indeed, the key element of LLL is not community-based learning programmes but rather a two-fold trend of
- opening up educational institutions to non-traditional students (bringing adults onto the campus) in the name of social inclusion and
- taking formalised campus courses into the workplace in the search for a viable workforce to encourage competitiveness.
Both are driven by qualificationism and the commodification of learning programmes. Both ignore or demean the natural learning that goes on outside formalised learning programmes. Once again, as with NFE, formal education (schooling) has taken over adult education and seeks to make it more like itself. LLL has fallen into the educational rather than the social development sector. True lifelong learning will not be controlled by education (schooling) but will take its stand on the social development side of the fault line.
CONCLUSION
There are times when I feel relatively optimistic - hoping that we are seeing cyclical trends, and that a more localised, less qualificatory form of adult and non-formal education will return. There are other times when I wonder whether we have turned a corner permanently and that the old battles have been lost for ever. Others than myself will see whether the future lies with the more contextualised, more participatory forms of learning which adult literacy is enjoying as it becomes divorced from its educational background, or whether formal schooling with its overemphasis on qualifications will continue to dominate even in adult and non-formal education.
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