TOWARDS LIFELONG EDUCATION FOR ALL — ADULT EDUCATION
 1976Adoption of the Recommendation on the development of adult education, General Conference of UNESCO, Nairobi
|
A limitless field
The pursuit of one’s education alone requires a great deal of will-power, powerful
incentives and, most important of all, unusual perseverance. Hence the value of
outside assistance, i.e. a community organization. Here again the field is limitless.
From evening and correspondence courses to the people’s universities of the Soviet Union
and the workers’ universities in Yugoslavia, from the modest ‘polytechnical villages’
in Kenya to the ‘universities without walls’ of New York and Ohio, from the major
co-operative undertakings in Belgium, Switzerland or Canada to the programmes of the
Conservatoire français des arts et métiers, from the multimedia experiments in
Quebec to the Open University in the United Kingdom, from literacy campaigns to
the impressive Indian project for the use of a satellite, and from the university of
the air in Japan to refresher training courses in industry: all man’s imagination and
magnanimity, like the constraints of the modern economy, combine to produce an
unending stream of new institutions.
In: World problems in education; a brief analytical survey,
Jean Thomas, UNESCO, 1975
|
|
THE 1980s AND 1990s, BEYOND INSTITUTIONALIZATION, In the 1980s, the development of lifelong education created a veritable market for adult education, demand often preceding supply. The Fourth International Conference, held in Paris in 1985, (16) recorded a considerable explosion in this demand and the widening of the sphere of adult education, and this despite – or perhaps even because of – an often complex international context and economic crises then affecting many countries. Adult education appeared to be the indispensable educational dimension of social, cultural and economic policies, as well as of all development programmes. The Conference recommended that activities take into account the special needs of certain groups (17) and appealed in this respect to all structures, traditional or new, formal or non-formal, public or private, and especially higher education, the media and industry. Finally, it stressed the role of UNESCO and the importance of international co-operation in areas such as legislation, finance, media and methods, training, research and evaluation. The final declaration defined a new international right, the right to learn.
|
| Different providers, contents and disadvantaged receivers groups in adult education |
||
|---|---|---|
| Adult educators, agriculture extension workers, co-operatives educators, health educators, family-life educators, nutritionists, veterinarians, labour educators, army education corps, etc. | Literacy, food production, income generation, child-care, family-planning and health, union education, labour laws, civil and voting rights, co-operative management, peace education, environmental protection, etc. | The rural poor, slum dwellers, the homeless, ethnic minorities, women, the aged, the handicapped, fishermen, youth, the famine-stricken, migrant labour, etc. |
|
H.S. Bhola.World Trends and Issues in Adult Education. |
||
|
In 1990, the World Conference on Education for All (Jomtien, Thailand) adopted a
Framework for Action to Meet the Basic Learning Needs of Children, Adolescents and
Adults. It sought to create a national environment favourable to this by recommending
the mobilization of new resources and by advocating the broadening of existing
co-operation and the forging of closer links between civil society in all its
diversity and the responsible civil authorities, from education to defence, including
labour, agriculture and health. In short, lifelong education became the responsibility
of all, and no longer that of governments and specialized organizations alone. This new
approach was to modify considerably the task of adult education institutions which are
less solicited as direct suppliers of education, but whose expertise could guide the
whole range of institutions called upon to supply educational services to adults. And,
what is valid for the national level is also applicable at international level, and
especially to the specific role of UNESCO foremost among all the agencies working in
adult education. The Fifth International Conference on
Adult Education (Hamburg, July 1997), preparations for which have been entrusted to the
UIE given the Institute’s action
in this field, (18) will certainly reflect these
evolutions.
|
| SOME INNOVATIVE PROJECTS |
|---|
|
|
TO LEARNING THROUGHOUT LIFE
The elaboration and dissemination of the concept of lifelong education has certainly
been one of the most significant advances in educational thinking since the end of the
Second World War.
The expression ‘lifelong education’, which in the 1950s and early 1960s was applied to
the continuing education and training of adults from the end of the 1960s onwards came
to designate, for UNESCO and a growing number of countries, a much broader and richer
ideal. Since then, lifelong education has meant a continuous process which, starting in
infancy, extends throughout life and takes in all types and levels of education, going
well beyond so-called formal education. Lifelong education is intended for all ages and
aims, so as to take advantage of the whole of a society’s educational potential and all
the situations in which individuals may find themselves to help them to fulfil themselves
and to decide their own destinies. It entails linkage, complementarity and ‘horizontal’
and ‘vertical’ continuing between the different forms and levels of formal and
non-formal education, i.e. continuity between the different educational experiences
through life. The overall conception represented by the idea of lifelong education thus
implies consistency through the whole of a society’s educational activity, but by no
means does it imply rigid administrative structuring.
The dissemination of the concept of lifelong education in the 1960s gave a powerful
impetus to educational thinking and stimulated reforms, some of which concerned the
whole education system. Later, in the 1970s, the concept was further developed and
refined in the report of the International Commission on the Development of Education,
set up by UNESCO and chaired by Edgar Faure, and was one of its central ideas. The
report, published in 1972 with the title Learning to Be, was to set going again with
renewed vigour the debate on the need to rethink the whole of educational activity
with lifelong education in mind.
More than twenty years later, another international commission, set up by UNESCO and
this time chaired by Jacques Delors, the International Commission on Education for
the Twenty-first Century, took up the idea of lifelong education and analyzed its
implications in a profoundly changed historical context. In so doing, the Commission
suggested using the expression ‘learning throughout life’ rather than lifelong
education, so as to avoid any possible confusion with simple adult education.
The Commission’s report clearly shows the implementation of the principles of lifelong
education to be more than ever essential for enabling education to play to the full
its role in society.
UNESCO: an ideal in action. The continuing relevance
of a visionary text. |
Edgar Faure (France) Chairman of the International Commission on the Development of Education Adult education assumes especial importance to the extent that it may be decisive in the success of non-adults’ school activities. For children’s primary education – a primordial objective – cannot be dissociated from their parents’ educational levels. The rising generations cannot be properly trained in an illiterate environment. Learning to Be, Report of the International Commission on the Development of Education, UNESCO, 1972
René Maheu Closing Address to the Third International Conference on Adult Education, Tokyo, 1972
Julius K. Nyerere Quoted in Campaigning for literacy, UNESCO, 1984
Bogdan Suchodolski Education permanente en profondeur, UIE Studies No. 2, 1993
Paul Bélanger UNESCO and Adult Education, International Encyclopaedia of Education, 2nd ed., Vol. 11, 1994
Ettore Gelpi L’éducation permanente: principe révolutionnaire et pratiques conservatrices, Revue internationale de l’éducation, Vol. 40, no. 3-5, 1994
|
|||
|
1952 |
1970 |
||
1982 |
1982 |
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
1984 |
1993 |
||
1995 |
1996 |
|||
| TO KNOW MORE (see also CD-ROM, Vol.I) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
FOOTNOTES:
(16) The Paris Conference was prepared by means of an international survey to which 76 National Commissions replied. It was preceded by regional consultations in 1982 and 1983.
(17) Women, young people, the elderly, minorities, migrant workers, disadvantaged groups, populations threatened by famine.
TO KNOW MORE (see also CD-ROM, Vol. I)