ABSTRACT
Education is for adults as well as children. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a new enthusiasm for adult education, stimulated by political, economic and religious ideas. Newly independent states wanted an educated electorate. From Ghana in the 1950s to Nicaragua in the 1980s reforming governments saw adult education as part of a virtuous circle of political change. There is an apparently obvious economic case for adult education. Programmes of agricultural education and extension, or of health and nutrition, have with good reason been based on the assumption that better education will directly improve people’s livelihoods. Nyerere carried the argument further, pressing that, ‘we must educate the adults of Tanzania…we cannot wait until our educated children are grown up before we get economic and social development; it is the task of those who are already full-grown citizens of our country to begin this work’ (Nyerere 1973:137). Liberation theology, too, gave an impetus for adult education. Popular education in Latin America can trace its origins back to Simón Rodríguez, Bolivar’s teacher, but gained increased support from the priesthood after Vatican II and the church’s commitment to building a new social order of which improved education was part (La Belle 1986:184). In the late 1970s international agencies were lending their weight to the same process. As early as 1971 the World Bank was interested in finding ‘less costly education through nonformal training’ and ‘alternatives to formal primary education’ and went on to commission a review of nonformal education from the International Council for Educational Development (Romain and Armstrong 1987:2) That review (Coombs and Ahmed 1974) and a group of related academic studies of adult education (Coombs et al. 1973; Ahmed and Coombs 1975) brought ideas about nonformal education into the Bank at a time when ‘there was already an unease about the pattern of their support to formal education’; one consequence was an unusual, and as it turned out temporary, willingness to lend for nonformal education so that, ‘of the 92 education projects with nonformal education and training components between 1963 and 1985, 63 were funded between 1973 and 1979’ (King 1991:168).
