Global Networks, Local Actions

Rethinking adult education policy in the 21st century

Marcella Milana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317385752
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Global Networks, Local Actions: Rethinking adult education policy in the 21st century examines public policy developments in adult education, exploring the policy framing of adult education practice in a range of socio-cultural contexts, and contributing to the development of policy research from global and comparative perspectives.

Drawing from multidisciplinary fields such as adult education, comparative and international education, and sociology, chapters analyse empirically grounded studies from the US, Italy, Argentina and Brazil. Each study helps to identify how political agents interact at international, regional, national and local scales, and what the implications are for publically-funded interventions in adult education. While this book recognises the complexity of adult education policy, it argues for the need to deconstruct the false belief that what is global in adult education may be intrinsically distinct from the characteristics of geographical or social territories in which adult education occurs. Instead, it points to localised norms and ideas on Adult Basic and Secondary Education as ultimately contained in, and constituting, what is at times perceived as global, or abstracted from definite geographical or social territories.

This book calls for a global sociology of adult education in response to global challenges, and makes an important contribution to our understanding of developments in public adult education policy. As such, it will be of key interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of adult education, comparative and international education, education policy and politics, sociology of education, and global studies.

Part I

Theory, heuristic and method

Chapter 1

A global sociology perspective on adult education

Introduction

This book is about public adult education policy. Apparently a self-evident concept, adult education always requires some explanation. In this book, it refers to all practices and processes that consider adults as pedagogical subjects, independently of age, responsibilities, educational attainment, socio-economic conditions, and venues. Education, however, stresses that it is a social institution or form of “institutionalization of learning” ( Jarvis, 1993) that falls under the state’s responsibility, and through which adults can extend and develop their knowledge, skills, judgements and sense-making actions and capacities. As such, in this book, adult education is, for the most part, equated with basic literacy and education up to secondary school levels for out-of-school youth and adults (i.e. Adult Basic and Secondary Education – ABSE). Policy serves as the identifier for a course of action, as guiding principles and procedures that influence and determine present and future decisions. As such, it refers to both statements (e.g. decisions, documents, regulations, orders, laws) and the meaning-making and decision processes behind them, which are directed towards desired solutions to problems perceived in the life of individuals and social aggregates. But a public policy has its own peculiarities. Firstly, it affects a greater portion of the population than any other policy. Secondly, it is made on behalf of the public, which includes but is not limited to the population it affects, by those holding representational power. Thus a public policy is first and foremost associated with what governments do, but also with what they choose not to do (Birkland, 2010). In fact, also the absence of policy aimed at producing change in the life of individuals and social aggregates is an implicit statement in support of preserving the existing state of affairs. But governments do not act in isolation; they also join other governments in international groups and alliances or intergovernmental organisations with their own governing bodies, such as the United Nations, the Organisation of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture (OEI) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), just to mention a few. In Europe, national governments even delegate part of their sovereign power to shared institutions when they join the European Union (EU). Thus, a public policy comprises also what intergovernmental organisations choose to do or not to do in the accomplishment of their missions.

In this line of thinking, both explicit and implicit statements about adult education by governments or intergovernmental organisations, and the meaning-making and decision processes behind such statements, affect, at least in principle, a vast majority of the population living in the territories under their jurisdictions or range of influence. This is so as public policy regulates, steers and directs the actions of a number of social actors with diverse motivations and understandings of the problems at stake within the realm of the education and learning of adults and the solutions proposed.

This chapter sets the stage for the book. It starts by considering the relations that a public policy holds with both polity and praxis. It continues with the conceptual framework for comprehending the public domain of adult education policy as comprised of different scales (i.e. urban, regional, national, continental and global), and demonstrates how the scales connect. On this ground, it then furthers this multi-disciplinary approach through debating: (1) polity expansion, (2) governance, and (3) policy crossing. Finally, it presents the heuristic model that has guided the research of public adult education policy presented in parts II and III of this book.

Polity, policy and praxis

As a social institution, adult education is the result of the interplay between polity, policy and praxis. Whereas a conception of public policy opened this chapter, it is equally important to clarify how polity and praxis are construed in this book. Polity describes an organised community and particular system of government that constitute the political setting for a policy. By contrast, praxis refers to a habitual or established practice, such as that which occurs in educational settings.

Adult education as a praxis developed over centuries worldwide; thus, national-specific histories are inherently entangled in wider social, political and cultural phenomena and the changes experienced by individual countries and, in some cases, entire regions. This explains many of the similarities and diversities in pedagogical traditions that coexist within, and most evidently across, countries.

As public policy, however, adult education has a relatively shorter and, to some extent, more homogeneous history. In most countries, explicit governmental statements about the education of adults were made in the nineteenth century, together with the institutionalization of public education, and often, yet not exclusively, for its compensatory and remedial functions. Even if adult education praxis has been, for the most part, initiated by civil society and moved by religious or professional concerns, throughout the twentieth century, governmental statements have reconsidered its scope, thus turning adult education into an instrument for tackling social problems, at least in Western societies. Here adult education has been strongly associated with the welfare state (Griffin, 1987; Jarvis, 1993; Pöggeler, 1990). In the United States of America, for instance, this proceeded Roosevelt’s New Deal (Roosevelt, 1938); in the UK, it followed the Beveridge Report (Beveridge, 1942), whereas throughout the rest of Europe, but also in Japan and New Zealand, adult education was included in welfare policy during the reconstruction process that followed the Second World War. Finally, a similar trend occurred in most of Latin America with the shifts in social protection policies that followed the economic crisis of the 1980s. Over time, this has led to broader separations between state understandings of adult education as either a purely social or a purely developmental policy. In transitional or less economically developed countries, adult education has also served as a step towards better social, cultural and economic development, albeit under the shadow of post-colonialist relations (Gelpi, 1985). In this line of thought, the polity for adult education policy is, for the most part, associated with a national system of government.

State rationales and policy models

Since the 1980s, political sociological studies have shed light on national developments in adult education, and how these are conditioned by the state and its policy. Comparisons of countries as diverse as Canada, Mexico, Nicaragua and Tanzania brought to the forefront how the state and its policy promote specific understandings of the aims of adult education and who its beneficiaries shall be, thus justifying governmental intervention in adult education provision (Arnove & Torres, 1995). Torres (1989, 1996) distinguishes four distinctive state rationales or policy models. In the therapeutic model (renamed “welfare state model” in Torres, 2013), the state acts as benefactor, helping adults recover from individual deficits. In the recruitment/franchisement model, the state is primarily concerned with the incorporation of a larger number of adults into a dominant political model, thus addressing the same deficits but from the perspective of a lack of social participation and representation by certain groups. In the forced modernization model, the state directs attention to the productivity deficiency in rural areas, and the absence of social organisation and services, hence acting as a driver for the accumulation of capital by integrating the adult population into the implementation of modern production techniques. In all three models, however, adult education assumes a “compensatory legitimation” function in integration with other state strategies. The case of transitional states, most notably Latin American countries during political transitions, is different. Here, according to Torres (1996), adult education may assume an empowerment function as the state aims at structuring people’s organisations through its control; such a revolutionary model, however, exists only temporarily, before it evolves into one of the other models. Recently, Torres (2013) has theorised also a popular public model that attempts to resolve conflicts between the state and the civil society through multidimensional deliberations that occur via partnerships and alliances. Whereas the first four policy models are grounded in substantive observations but restricted to North American, Latin American and selected African countries, the fifth policy model is more a potential projection than an existing reality. As such, these policy models might only partially, if at all, reflect state rationales in other countries and regions of the world.

Over the last few years, governmental accounts on adult education have been produced worldwide in response to the calls of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (UIL, 2009, 2013). These are not to be confused with bold research. Even so, a glance at these accounts allows for a few complementary observations. First, there are governments that overtly equate adult education with the opportunities for undeserved groups to increase their literacy, and show a comparatively higher involvement of governmental bodies responsible for adult education policy, among which are ministries of defence, interior/home affairs, agriculture and health. This is particularly so in those countries that experienced socio-political turmoil for most of their history as independent nations in Africa (e.g. Botswana, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Nigeria) or the Arab region (e.g. Iraq, Jordan). Second, there are governments that associate adult education chiefly with technical and vocational education and training for youngsters and adults who are unemployed or at risk of exclusion from the labour market. Here, ministries of education and labour stand out, as in North America and a number of European countries. Moreover, adult literacy is seldom an appendix of immigration policies, though the literacy capacities of indigenous populations are regaining attention (EC, 2013; OECD, 2013). Finally, there is a third group of governments, mostly from Latin America and Asia, that also equate adult education with literacy, but are incorporating complementary views on the importance of technical and vocational adult education and training so as to accommodate the development of democratic processes and/or economic expansion (e.g. Argentina, Brazil), for the most part, under the leadership of national ministries of education.

In brief, state rationales and policy models are an essential component of adult education developments in any given country, though not the only determinants. As already mentioned, states and governments are not immune from ideas that come from outside governmental structures; nor are they in isolation but rather in communication with other political structures, including intergovernmental organisations. Thus, the national is an important scale but not the only one that counts for comprehending adult education policy and how it affects praxis.

International cooperation

Overtly or not, several contributors have pointed at the ways international cooperation has evolved as key to comprehending changes in both the polity – or setting for adult education policy, and state rationales and policy models at the national scale.

For instance, Bhola (1994, p. 319) suggested that, since the Second World War, adult education policy at the state level “owe[s] a debt to UNESCO” with special reference to policy conception and implementation in developing countries. This debt pertains to the setting of international norms, stating the relevant content of adult education policy that is to be implemented at the national scale. The values and purpose of adult education embedded in these norms, as well as their impact on the implementation of adult education worldwide, have changed throughout the history of UNESCO’s International Conferences on Adult Education (CONFINTEA).

Analysis of these conferences, organised since 1949, highlighted how the international norms to which Bhola referred, have generally reflected broader changes in societal features (cf. Knoll, 2007), but also debates at first restricted to Anglo-American and European governments and intergovernmental organisations that over time were open also to governments from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Arab region, as well as to international non-governmental organisations (Hinzen, 2007; Milana 2013).

In the 1970s, 1990s and 2000s these conferences led to policy statements to which national governments from around the world formally committed, such as the UNESCO Recommendation on the development of adult education (1976) – to date, the only international legal instrument in this area, which was revised in 2015, the Hamburg Declaration on Adult Learning and the related Agenda for the Future (UNESCO, 1997) and the Belèm Framework for Action (UNESCO, 2009).

Within the European region, international cooperation in education had started long before the appearance of the EU, as its grounding principles were found in post-1945 Europe, when professionals, researchers and policymakers with an interest in education networked across borders (Lawn & Grek, 2012). A cornerstone in the institutionalisation of the exchanges of knowledge and ideas around education, as Pépin (2006) claimed, is For a Community Policy on Education (1973), which argued that a common education policy was in line with the Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community (1957).

Thus, the policy principles at the core of a regional education policy in Europe, such as policy approximation or policy harmonisation, have been promoted via cross-European projects and activities run in partnership between a multiplicity of European associations of universities, schools, trade unions etc., with the support of the European Commission, and, since the late 1990s, thanks to the development of specific programmes (i.e. Erasmus, Socrates, Leonardo, and Comenius) in support of joint Europe-wide education projects across sectors (Lawn & Grek, 2012; Pépin, 2006).

In short, international cooperation via networking, cross-dissemination of ideas, and brokering across national borders, institutions, educational sub-systems, and productive sectors has been centrally backed by intergovernmental organisations like UNESCO or the EU (Dale & Robertson, 2008; Milana, 2014; Rasmussen, 2014). As a consequence, adult education as a public policy is the result of interactions between (at the least) national, regional and global scales.

Scales and socio-political hierarchies

In geography, a scale represents the proportion between the representation and what it represents, or the ratio for calculating the actual distance in space between geographical locations. In the social sciences, however, Lefebvre (1991) noted, space represents a social product that, like other commodities (i.e. capital), incorporates as much as prevents social relations. Accordingly, he argued for a unitary theory of space based on three spatial elements that are in a dialectical relation: the physical or perceived space, the idealised or conceived space, and the experiential or lived space that incorpora...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Theory, heuristic and method
• Part II Global networks
• Part III Local actions
• Part IV Cutting through networks and actions
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Information on country-relevant interviews and class observations
• Index