Adult education a panacea to sustainable development
The 21st Century epoch like never before, demands continued and sustained learning both formal and non-formal so as to keep abreast with the rapidly changing technology, education, ICT and science, which are a bedrock for any learning society whether urban, peri-urban or rural.
This helps in skills development and its utilization, attitude change and enlargement of social and economic networks, which certainly brings about development, knowledge sufficiency and better incomes.
How does this happen? When society continuously and purposively seeks knowledge through reading, research, ICT, trainings and application of the new knowledge and skills, it helps people to better understand and read their communities, resources, and problems and identifies opportunities.
By doing so, communities become alive and organic, active and innovative hence are able to find sustainable solutions to identified societal problems and design actions that are pro-people that harnesses skills and knowledge for common good of communities.
Secondly, continuous learning helps in integration of and interconnecting skills, knowledge and attitudes that helps in multi -disciplinary learning and cooperation. This helps in building teams, resiliency and synergies.
Thirdly, adult education helps learners to effectively turn and use their wealth of experience in shaping actions of today and tomorrow. This is vital because corrective actions from past mistakes make individuals and communities to design most appropriate projects and interventions.
Fourthly, adult education creates a society that thirsts for knowledge thereby fulfilling the adage that a reading society is a living society.
Adult education helps in creating critical minds as opposed to magical and naïve minds that domesticates rather than liberate individuals. The challenge with magical and naïve mind is that these minds are susceptible to manipulations and favour seeking tendencies.
Unfortunately, this is the state of affairs in Uganda’s’ populace where critical ideas are seen as anti-government and non–patriotic. Yet independent minds that are created and sustained by adult education are catalysts for sustainable development as enshrined in the Sustainable Development Goals, sustained utilisation of both natural and human resources. Most vivid example of development by adult education efforts can be drawn from Brazil, India, Singapore, USA and Europe.
The magic in adult education is that it deals with attitude change and empathy for others by making the learner/adult educator compassionate, humble and able to listen. This encourages the wider community to strive for the common good and be able to rewrite their own history.
Despite the enormous good of adult education, many people do not see adult education as a noble discipline/profession yet the great movers and shakers of history are adult educators such as Paulo Freire, Frank Gunder, and Martin Luther King, among others.
In our time, adult education is a least sought profession. For example, in Uganda, adult and community education is offered only at Makerere and Kyambogo universities churning out only a few hundreds every year yet the need and demand for adult educators supersedes the much needed numbers.
For any meaningful learning, education must not be banking and depository, but rather andragogical and liberating. This is because education other than adult education domesticates.
Mr Ekimia is the managing partner of Valor Associate Consultants, Graduate student of Uganda Martyrs University and a Human Rights Defender. [email protected]
