TOWARDS LIFELONG EDUCATION FOR ALL — ADULT EDUCATION
 1960Second World Conference on Adult Education, Montreal
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THE 1960s AND 1970s,
TOWARDS INSTITUTIONALIZATION The two conferences in Montreal (1960) and Tokyo (1972) contributed to the gradual integration of adult education into education systems. These conferences were held at a time when the contribution of education to economic development was generally acknowledged, and where considerable changes had begun to affect lifestyles, especially in countries where rates of industrialization and urbanization were becoming more pronounced. The immensity of needs, together with the massive recourse to communication technologies, created a new situation which rendered government intervention inevitable. In 1960, the Montreal Conference, which was attended by a remarkable number of newly independent countries, first underscored the need to give absolute priority to the eradication of illiteracy. Discussing the central theme of ‘Adult Education in a Changing World’, this meeting vigorously affirmed the principle that adult education should henceforth be accepted by people everywhere as normal, and that all governments should treat it as a necessary component of educational provision. (11) The Conference also focused on the emerging educational needs of women and families. The 1972 Tokyo Conference, (12) which immediately followed the publication of the Faure Commission report Learning to Be, centred on the theme of lifelong education and equal access to education. It proposed a methodology for the formulation of adult education policies and programmes within the framework of national educational systems. It stressed the complementary roles of formal and non-formal education, and the need to integrate adult education into the educational planning process. Faced with the ‘world education crisis’, adult education emerged as a solution to the problems that school and university education were no longer able to resolve. Taking a stand against a purely functional conception, the Conference also pronounced in favour of a humanistic strategy, insisting on the relationship between adult education and cultural development, and on the importance of art education, museums and libraries.
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Rural Education Seminar for Adults 
Out of India’s 180 million adults, only seventeen million can read and
write. This means that in spite of what has been done in the last decades,
India’s illiterate adult population numbers 153 millions, or more than 90%.
Since the Seminar was inaugurated by India’s Education Minister, Maulana
Azad on November 2, leaders and delegates have clearly indicated the
practical lines on which they will work.
There is, however, no confusion in the minds of those working near Mysore on the difference between literacy and education.
In a broadcast from the Seminar, Professor Humayun Kabir, Joint Secretary,
Indian Ministry of Education gave this definition of fundamental education
for adults: UNESCO and the Indian Government have called the Mysore Seminar in order to provide educational leaders from Asia and elsewhere in the world with the opportunity to give content and practical shape to this definition. The work of the seminar is organized in four working groups, each having carefully planned objectives and scope for studies. The first group, under the Chairmanship of Dr Mohamed Salim of Iraq, began its studies of literacy and adult education with discussions on the definition and purpose of literacy. Chairman of Group 2, which is studying health and home life problems in rural areas, is Professor S. Y. Chu, of the China Mass Education Movement. Group 3, which is concerned with the economic aspects of rural adult education, is led by Dr Spencer Hatch, of the Inter-American Institute of Agricultural sciences. Jovial Professor A. N. Basu, of Calcutta University, who attended UNESCO’s first Seminar at Sèvres, near Paris, in 1947, is directing the studies of the fourth group into social and citizenship aspects of rural education. One of the Indian delegates, Shri Aryanayalam, who has worked closely with both Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi, called the village leader and council together and talked to them. ‘Clear the dirt from your roads, homes and lives’, he said. ‘I am ashamed of you. You have a school that is not fit for cattle to live in. I worked with the Mahatma and was with him when he decided to settle down in the most backward of all villages. Gandhi chose that village because he said if he could accomplish something there he could do anything. But you too must do something for yourselves. Build a new school, keep your village and homes clean. Then you will live a happier life.’ The UNESCO Courier, December 1949. |
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After these conferences, UNESCO’s adult education programme took on a
new dimension and was placed within the framework of lifelong education
to renew educational systems. The Organization strengthened its role as
a world centre for the exchange of information in this domain, (13) and
contributed to the circulation of ideas by facilitating the organization
of meetings of experts. It also provided assistance to the European Centre
for Leisure and Education, opened at the Charles University in Prague in
former Czechoslovakia. An NGO, the International Council for Adult
Education (ICAE), created in 1973 with the patronage of UNESCO, became a
new instrument in the service of international co-operation. (14)
The Organization became more closely involved in promoting the
establishment and development in Member States of institutions, services
and mechanisms required to generalize educational activities for adults,
and continues to support activities to train specialized educators led
by governmental or non-governmental instances.
To sustain the effects of the work of these different conferences on adult education organized by UNESCO and by many other international bodies, (15) the 19th session of UNESCO’s General Conference in Nairobi (1976) adopted a Recommendation on the development of adult education which summarizes the main trends in this domain since 1949. It also defines the principles, objectives and orientations which should preside over the development of adult education, as well as the measures that Member States are invited to take at national, regional and international levels to implement this recommendation. Each State should ‘recognize adult education as a necessary and specific component of its education system and as a permanent element in its social, cultural and economic development policy’.
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and lifelong education in 1968 by René Maheu
With regard to lifelong education, it is now a matter of common
knowledge that this is the concept which explains the real meaning
of modern education and which should inspire and sum up all efforts
directed towards reform. Education is no longer confined to a particular
age, that is, only a part of life; co-existent throughout its length,
it represents an attitude and a dimension of life. It is an attitude
enabling us to keep in touch with realities and not simply a preparation
for work and responsibilities.
This radical change in outlook ruthlessly reveals all the difficulties
encountered, which spring up on every side, and at the same time provides
the only path to their solution. But lifelong education must not remain
a mere slogan. Indeed, no reconversion requires so vast and complex a
forward planning. For what is involved is no less than a merging of
school and university education in a global system within which
out-of-school education and the so-called adult education, now generally
regarded as marginal, are destined to appear as the very core of the
discipline of the mind.
In this connection UNESCO has hitherto contented itself with a few meetings
and a few publications which have kept alive interest in the subject
without adding greatly to an understanding of it. In the period following
International Education Year, which we have reason to hope, as I said
earlier, will give an impetus to global thinking and the will to reform,
this ought to be the main line along which should be planned, over the
next decade, UNESCO’s activities in all matters pertaining to education.
Introduction to the Report of the Director-General on the activities of the
Organization in 1968. |
Paul Lengrand (France) Former Head of the Division of Adult Education at UNESCO, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Education from 1967 to 1968, Member of the Secretariat of the International Commission on the Development of Education In respect of adults, education is now compelled to invent, to innovate and to imagine. No curriculum can endure unless it takes into account, not universal and abstract man but the concrete individual in all his dimensions and needs. [...] Equally essential is it for each [responsible for adult education] to modify the teacher’s traditional image and to accept the fact that he becomes an adult among other adults, with his own blend of knowledge and ignorance, of abilities and incapacities. The institutionalization of lifelong education presents particularly complex problems in regard to adults, children and adolescents. Even more than formal education, it presupposes a ‘transformation of society’s structures in a way which would be favourable to personality development’. In this way it becomes ‘an eminently political operation, insofar as the totality of the community’s structures are concerned with its realization.’
An Introduction to Lifelong Education, In the long term, however, there will be no solution to the problem of a better life except in a society imbued through and through with the principle of lifelong education and in an education closely bound up with the advances and achievements of society. In Search of Lifelong Education, UNESCO, 1972 |
FOOTNOTES:
(11) The Montreal Declaration, Second World Conference on Adult Education, Education Studies and Documents No. 46, UNESCO, 1963.
(12) The Tokyo Conference was prepared by means of 97 country reports which highlighted the diversity of adult education programmes. Besides literacy education, and especially the EWLP, new themes and target groups became apparent: women, immigrant workers, out-of-school education for youth, family planning, etc.
(13) Adult Education Information Notes, published since 1973, is distributed in five languages in over 18,000 copies. Publication in 1979 of the Terminology of Adult Education.
(14) The ICAE federates regional organizations which meet on the occasion of World Adult Education assemblies: Dar es Salaam 1976, Paris 1982, Buenos Aires 1985, Bangkok 1990, Cairo, 1994. It publishes the review Convergences. The International Community Education Association (ICEA) created in Coventry, United Kingdom, in 1975 is an association with some 6,000 members, either local organizations or private individuals in more than 80 countries.
(15) Chiefly, the International conference of the International Women’s Year (Mexico, 1975), relevant recommendations of the International conference on paid sabbatical leave, (1974), and on human resources development (1975).
The first number of Education permanente, the review published by the
Institut national pour la formation des adultes, is devoted to
International Education Year, and was produced in co-operation with UNESCO.
This special issue was officially presented to René Maheu,
Director-General of UNESCO, by Julien Cain, President of the
French Commission for UNESCO on 9 June 1970. From Left to right:
Yves Brunsvick, Secretary-General of the French Commission for
UNESCO, Julien Cain and René Maheu.