TOWARDS LIFELONG EDUCATION FOR ALL — TEACHERS

1961-1964 First secondary teacher-training institutes created with the assistance of UNESCO and the United Nations Special Fund 1964-1975 Regular exchange of experiences between National Directors and Chief Technical Advisers about educational personnel training projects 1966 A Special Intergovernmental Conference adopts the Joint UNESCO-ILO Recommendation on the Status of Teachers 1972-1979 Regional networks of educational innovation for development established (APEID, CARNEID, CODIESEE, EIPDAS, NEIDA)

... AND REDEFINE THE ROLES AND PROFILES OF TEACHERS The first activities, studies, experiments and pilot projects soon brought to light that one of the major concerns in this field was linked to the design and implementation of training programmes engendered by the adoption of new contents and methods (for example, audiovisuals) and by growing anxieties amongst teachers on how to improve their qualifications. The issue of identifying the new roles and profiles of teachers had therefore to be addressed from the point of view of enhancing their professionalism, their ability to adapt to the changes taking place in their milieux whilst at the same time contributing actively to such changes within the framework of local community development. This question would be taken up as the central theme of the International Conference on Education in 1975 which, in particular, took into account the experience acquired by teacher-training institutes (teacher- training colleges, rural teacher-training colleges, and higher teacher-training colleges) created in the previous decade with the participation of UNESCO.

THE 1960s TEACHER-TRAINING INSTITUTES IN AFRICA In teacher-training institutes established at the end of the 1960s with the assistance of UNESCO in six African countries (Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Liberia, Niger, Togo) the aim was not to train teachers responsible for a class or for teaching one subject or another, but to produce rural educators well adapted to the local conditions in which they are called upon to work, capable of setting up and organizing a whole series of community development activities. The institutions created in these 6 countries pursued two parallel objectives: training rural teachers qualified both for primary education adapted to essentially rural countries, and sufficiently familiarized with leadership activities to be able to effectively participate in community development; retraining and further training for in-service personnel: primary school inspectors, educational advisers, teacher trainers, school principals and beginner teachers at all levels, to inform them about on-going educational renewal and to familiarize them with new methods and techniques. Similar activities took place in other teacher-training colleges in other regions with the assistance of UNESCO and multilateral and bilateral aid.

1964	1967	1972
Tecnical Tranining Centre for Women, Dakar, Senegal.	Secondary School Teacher-training Institute, Bujumbura, Burundi	Training Institute for Secondary School Teachers, Omdurman, Sudan
1967 UNESCO DELEGATION VISITS ABIDJAN André Lestage, Division Chief in UNESCO’s Education Department, arrived in Abidjan yesterday morning accompanied by Dragoljub Najman, in charge of primary teacher training programmes. Mr André Lestage declared that the delegation he was heading was to discuss with the authorities the status and development of co- operation between the Côte d’Ivoire and UNESCO in the field of education. Mr Monsour, Chief of UNESCO’s regional mission, met the delegation at Port-Bouët Airport. Extract from the daily newspaper Fraternité Matin, Friday, 19 May 1967.

THE THREE THRUSTS OF UNESCO’S ACTION... In order to promote, sustain and verify these innovative trends in real terms, UNESCO has pursued its activities in three complementary ways: Studies to disseminate educational innovations As of the 1950s, and then in the 1960s, many kinds of studies were carried out to identify and define qualitative and quantitative needs and the innovations required to meet them. Results provided a regularly updated insight into the state-of-the-art of training worldwide, enabling positive experiences to be pinpointed, and decisions taken as to their generalization. The aim of this research was not to obtain knowledge per se, but to describe, analyse and assess facts or situations so as to produce practical approaches or pointers as to method, given concrete expression in the form of pilot projects, regional or sub-regional training courses and methodological guides, enabling maximum advantage to be taken of the most significant developments. Standards to guide decision-making Without neglecting the great variety of situations and problems with which Member States have been and continue to be faced, it was necessary to define general principles for action and analytical criteria that would assist Member States to formulate their educational policy, especially insofar as educational personnel was concerned. This function has been fulfilled through the drafting of Recommendations: first of all the joint UNESCO-ILO Recommendation adopted in Paris on 5 October 1966 by a Special Intergovernmental Conference on the status of teachers and, later, Recommendation No. 69 adopted in 1975 in Geneva by the 35th session of the International Conference on Education which to this day constitute a frame of reference for the teaching profession and teachertraining in light of the concept of lifelong education. The CD-ROM (Vol. I) which accompanies this brochure contains the full text of these recommendations.
1964 - 1975 Encouraging the exchange of national experiences Between 1964 and 1975, interregional meetings were convened every two years. For one or two weeks, these meetings gathered together national directors and chief technical advisers of UNDP-UNESCO operational projects to train educational personnel. On these occasions, participants shared their experience on common problems, such as organization and management, before going on to examine a specific topic in greater detail, as shown by the following recapitulative table. Meeting location Date Topic under discussion Abidjan 1964 Science training Dar es Salaam 1966 Psycho-pedagogical training Tunis 1967 Linguistics Paris 1969 Educational technology Paris 1971 Diversification of secondary education, training counterparts, continuous project evaluation, equal opportunities for women Paris 1973 Evaluation, applying educational technology, educational adjustment, out-of-school education, population education, using national languages Paris 1975 Evaluation, innovation, policies and training systems, training teachers and a global approach to the renewal of educational systems, education and national culture: languages, techniques and technology, education, production, work, psychological development of the child In this way, each training project became a further training forum for its own personnel enabling them to keep abreast of events. For UNESCO, it was proof of its fidelity to the principles of lifelong education of which it was the forerunner.	René Maheu (France) Director-General of UNESCO from 1962 to 1974 Teacher-training institutes, forming an integral part of the national education systems, must be imbued with a new spirit and train qualified teachers who will have a role to play both in the schools and in the outside community. Report of the Director-General on the Activities of the Organization, 1968 The Faure Commission One of the essential tasks for educators at present is to change the mentalities and qualifications inherent in all professions; thus they should be the first to be ready to rethink and change the criteria and basic situation of the teaching profession, in which the job of educating and stimulating students is steadily superseding that of simply giving instruction. Learning to Be, UNESCO, 1972 Paulo Freire Educator, former Secretary of State for Education of São Paulo, Brazil The educator is not he who knows, but he who knows how little he knows, and because of this seeks to know more, together with the educatee, who in turn knows that starting from his little knowledge he can come to know more. Here there is no split between knowing and doing; there is no room for the separate existence of a world of those who know, and world of those who work. Education on the move, UNESCO, 1975
1966 UNESCO-ILO JOINT RECOMMENDATION The Joint UNESCO-ILO Recommendation on the status of teachers was adopted in 1966. The fact that this instrument was the result of collaboration between these two Organizations respectively competent in the fields of education and labour endorsed the recognition that the status and the working conditions of teachers on the one hand, and their educational effectiveness on the other, are indissociable and interdependent. The main teachers’ unions co-operate with UNESCO, joining fully in the application of this recommendation, which is, moreover, the frame of reference of a joint UNESCO-ILO Committee of experts which meets periodically. Summary Definitions Scope Guiding principles Educational objectives and policies Preparation for the profession Further education for teachers Employment and career Rights and responsibilities of teachers Conditions for effective teaching and learning Teachers’ salaries Social security The teacher shortage Final provisions

An operational commitment to put theory into practice At the beginning of the 1960s, the problems brought about by decolonization and the awakening of deprived nations led UNESCO to become directly involved in large-scale operational action in technical co- operation for development made possible by means of a rapid upsurge in extra-budgetary funding, chiefly from the United Nations System. This was an activity which was to intensify until the beginning of the 1980s. Whilst bearing in mind the need for universality, UNESCO’s action is, nevertheless, carried out with due respect to specific regional contexts. In Africa activities were mainly in the form of direct intervention, in Latin America, they consisted in stimulating or strengthening existing institutions, and in Asia action was usually limited to guiding or facilitating co-ordination and networking of individual initatives. This operational action in technical co-operation for development was later followed up within a different international context, and with much more limited financial resources. Direct management of operational projects had offered the Organization a twofold opportunity: to verify the relevance and feasibility of the main ideas it proposed or conveyed, and to draw from the realities of field work the stimulation required to nourish its intellectual vocation. It also enabled the Organization to weigh up the various obstacles to the introduction and the propagation of educational innovations (6) and thus to refine its hypotheses of action, and its conceptual and methodological tools.

UNESCO’s OPERATIONAL ACTION to train teachers and other educational personnel In 1967, 93 experts were at work in 47 countries. These were, notably, in Africa: Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Congo-Léopoldville, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gabon, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, United Republic of Tanzania and Uganda; in the Arab States: Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Turkey and Yemen; in Asia: Afghanistan, Cambodia, India, Iran, Korea, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Pakistan, Philippines, Samoa, Thailand; and in Latin America and the Caribbean: Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru. It was observed, on the eve of the implementation of the First Medium-Term Plan that, from 1960 to 1974, UNESCO had ‘made an important contribution to training teachers in the developing countries.’ The Organization, in co-operation with UNDP and interested Member States, had participated in the training and further training of more than 300,000 primary school teachers. Divers initial or in-service training activities were also organized in co-operation with UNICEF; they reached almost 70,000 teachers. In 1974, UNICEF-UNESCO projects directly concerned with the initial or in-service training of various kinds of teacher, those in primary schools in particular, were on-going in 37 countries; 85 projects were implemented with UNDP assistance. Since 1978, a teacher-training component is to be found in 253 projects in Africa, 188 in Asia, 79 in Latin America and 53 in the Arab States.

                               

FOOTNOTES:

(6) In particular, the most subtle and most difficult obstacle to overcome, that of ‘the inherent inertia of educational systems which caused them to respond too sluggishly [...] even when resources have not been the main obstacle’ (Philip H. Coombs, The World Education Crisis, Oxford University Press, 1968).