There are supposedly only seven story plots in the world and South African adult education has already been through six of them.
The first story has adult education playing a heroic role in “overcoming the monster”. The monster was apartheid and adult education gave strength in knowledge and conscientising methods to the progressive forces.
As in most epic stories, the account became more embellished with each retelling, but the monster was real enough (though, as in the epic Beowulf, its mother is transparently alive as we still laboriously keep using the categories of racial classification).
After that first victory, adult education was then seen as the “rags to riches” path by which the previously educationally disadvantaged would become equal with the rest. Well, clearly that story did not have a happy ending, even in conventional schooling.
There was simultaneously an attempt, a “quest”, to find a holy grail by which all the dichotomies of manual and intellectual labour, technical and academic, could be united in some higher harmony.
The National Qualifications Framework and its knights of the round table in the South African Qualifications Authority (Saqa) strove and strove but, as with the aforesaid knights, things did not quite work out as planned, in spite of various emissaries sent out to places like Australia and the United States for various tinctures to heal education and training’s various ills.
These “voyages and returns” brought us such things as outcomes-based education, of whose actual outcomes the less said the better, particularly when fi nally the contagion reached the minds of university bureaucrats, of whom also the less said the better. Even by the mid-1990s it was clear that what happened to South African adult education was becoming a “tragedy”.
By now, nearly 20 years after our supposed liberation, it is clear that what we have ended with is more nearly “comedy”, or rather, farce, in the sense that Karl Marx used it of things repeating themselves in history — “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”.
Why has both official and non-official South African adult education become a farce and what is a supposedly progressive minister of higher education and training, under whose brief adult education rather uncomfortably sits, going to do about it?
It is irrefutable that the official adult basic education and training (Abet) system is thoroughly dysfunctional and highly unattractive to uneducated and ill-educated adults. It has been shoddily managed at both national and provincial levels. Its senior bureaucrats (now in the department of higher education and training) display no signs of energy or imagination and certainly show no interest in engaging with concerned people in the field.
Three examples of this:
- The almost total lack of follow-up to the ministerial committee report on adult education in mid-2008 or to the submissions made in response to an almost secret request for comment by April 30 2009;
- The equally underpublicised call for public comment on the Draft Interim Qualifications and Assessment Policy Framework for General Education and Training Certificate for Adults on February 26 this year that allowed a very short time for the public to make submissions
(14 days) in a very variegated field that has virtually no dedicated Abet institutions. The document itself is totally devoid of any engagement with the severe and longstanding criticisms of the existing Abet system and of the Abet Act, is shoddily written, and is replete with ignorant, misleading and ambiguous use of assessment terminology; and
- The total failure of the national Abet directorate to involve the country in the preparations for or follow-up to the Unesco conference on adult education held in December 2009 in Brazil (South Africa, incidentally, turned down the offer to host it).
Where the farce turns back into tragedy relates to the failure to take up the opportunity created by the success of the Kha Ri Gude adult literacy campaign that has, though seriously underfunded, reached nearly a million learners in two years and assessed them (in a process recently verified by Saqa).
Yet, as all literacy and fundamental educators vouch, if you don’t use it, you lose it, and the formal Abet system has signally failed to attract the Kha Ri Gude graduates into further learning. The situation in the non-governmental sector is not a great deal better.
Two adult education associations, the Adult Education and Training Association of South Africa (Aetasa) recently the Adult Learning Network (ALN), have failed to thrive.
Aetasa collapsed from mismanagement and failure to seriously gain a membership, and the ALN is now mired in controversy over governance issues. Genuine NGOs are few and often run on such small economies of scale that they are exorbitantly expensive per learner.
University-based adult education departments, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s were considered some of the best in the world, have been largely smashed and asset-stripped by the new education Philistines in charge of our universities.
To return to stories, the other plot is that of “rebirth”. Is it conceivable that adult education could have one? It could, as the Kha Ri Gude campaign illustrates. But the negative forces are still in ascendancy.
Educational equality is a fundamental component of social and economic equality. South Africa’s Gini coefficient, the recognised measure of inequality in society, is growing worse, not better. Adult education is not a “nice to have”, it is a necessity.
A start could be made by the new department of higher education and training recognising that it needs to engage with people who actually know something about adult education and want it to flourish.
It will need to bypass its present operatives who are a major part of the problem. It should also seriously engage with the positive mass base set up by the literacy campaign.
Blade, it’s time to pick up your spear. What are you going to do about it?
John Aitchison is emeritus professor of adult education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Anybody interested in an exhilarating account of the seven basic plots should read Christopher Booker’s book of the same title