The last serious South African policy works on adult basic education and on adult education as a whole were the two national education policy investigation reports published in 1992 and 1993 and the national department of education’s 1997 Policy Document on Adult Basic Education and Training (Abet).
Generally speaking the implementation of the official 1997 policy was weak to appalling. In 2005 the then minister of education, Naledi Pandor, called for a complete ‘revamp” of the adult education system. Of Abet, she recognised that it had become ‘utilitarian and narrow” and had ‘sought to make adults like children … we are teaching schooling.”
Four years later we have a mass literacy campaign that works (if a somewhat more modestly scaled one than originally budgeted for) and the directorate for adult education is to be relocated into the new department of higher education under Minister Blade Nzimande.
In its new home will it be more effective than in the past? Will it begin to address the conundrum that literally millions of South African adults are skilled but uneducated or educated but unskilled (apart from the other four million or so who are
both uneducated and unskilled)?
An almost secret report
There is a ministerial committee report on a draft ‘green paper on a revamped adult education and training system for South Africa” — but it is almost a secret.
The committee (set up in October 2007) reported in mid-2008 but the only publicity this received was a poorly attended closed invitation colloquium held on March 5 this year. No request seems to have been made publicly for comments on the report, except for a brief notice buried in an obscure corner of the department of education website, and the final date for submissions was April 30.
Though these new proposals were ‘being presented for discussion by a wide range of stakeholders and interested parties”, the report noted, apologetically, that there was no consultation while it was being written. The report is remarkably decontextualised with little description of the current situation and its institutions and agents of provision.
Given that this report is partly a response to Pandor’s judgment that the existing system has failed to deliver to expectations, the lack of critique is surprising. What is clear, though not very obvious from the report, is that the only new comprehensive adult education and training qualification since 1994, the general education and training certificate for Abet learners, has been a catastrophic failure.
Unactionable wish lists
The report describes a number of things that South Africa should have if there is to be a vibrant adult education system. There is little attention to how they will be attained. In this sense the whole document reads like the typical preambles to the various education Acts, including the Abet Act of 2000 — high on principles and rhetoric but low on specific plans.
Unactionable ‘must” and ‘should” wish lists are predominant features and there is no rigorous critique of the failure of such bland rhetoric to engender adult education delivery since the mid-1990s.
Nothing on governance
Perhaps its greatest failure is that it does not deal with a governance framework at all, lamely arguing that this would best be done once a new adult education framework is in place.
This is a bizarre conclusion given that many of the problems with the current adult education system reside in the way it is governed — which the report tacitly admits when it states that ‘establishing constituted and functioning governance structures that encourage democratic participation are therefore essential”.
Over-narrow focus
Though the committee’s brief was to examine a full adult education and training system, it narrowed its focus to learning ‘up to Grade 12”. This may indeed be a reflection of the current directorate for adult education which, placed in a department largely given over to formal schooling, inevitably echoed this.
But this is not what most adults really want or need out of an adult education system. There is little discussion of how literacy, formal adult basic education, further education and training (FET) and skills programmes can work together (which is amazing given the many debates on the relationship between ‘the fundamentals” and skills training in Abet).
The national data scandal
The report does make a few coy references to the lack of data, which is a national scandal with the continuing incapacity of the national department of education to deliver Abet statistics. Unfortunately the report has behaved naively in accepting the department’s statistics on state provincial departments of education Abet funding.
I do not know how many times researchers have pointed out that these statistics mix data from departments that report only Abet expenditure as Abet expenditure and those that report both Abet and adult FET (matric level) expenditure as being Abet expenditure.A similar caveat must be made about the supposed Abet provision funded by the skills development levies.
To what extent these 1 021 570 learnings were genuine Abet is uncertain. Certainly the evidence from Umalusi is that virtually none of this resulted in any awards of a certificate in general education.
The adult educators?
The report does see a need for a policy framework for the professional development of adult educators at all levels and sectors, including continuing professional development through distance education.
Yet not a single reference is made in the report to the current higher education institutions that train adult educators, neither does it refer to the decline in capacity since the mid-1990s, nor to the serious threats to the continued existence of university bases for adult education practitioner and researcher development.
Who on earth is going to do the policy development, detailed planning, the national surveys and research seen as central to ‘the way forward” when resources such as the Institute for Abet at Unisa is about to be abolished and the Centre for Adult Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal ‘restructured”?
There is no critique in the report of the multitude of industry and business sector-related ‘adult educator” qualifications for skills development facilitators, assessors and moderators,
provided mainly by commercial providers, the quality and narrowness of many of which is a national scandal, verging on fraud.
Were they bold? Not really
The report does not form an adequate basis for a green paper. The committee was challenged by the then minister to be bold in their proposals.
Were they bold? Not really. How could they be when the committee totally funks the task of discussing governance and cannot even bring itself to admit that the national and provincial adult education/ Abet directorates are largely dysfunctional. The committee’s principles are wonderful, but without real proposals they are empty rhetoric.
Professor John Aitchison was head of the Centre for Adult Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and lead writer for the ministerial committee that formulated the Kha Ri Gude mass literacy campaign