Education and sustainability: reinvigorating adult education’s role in transformation, justice and development

Abstract

Distinctively economic objectives for lifelong education, especially adult learning and education, feature prominently in policy-making agendas and educators’ practice in much of the world. Critics contend that humanistic and holistic visions of lifelong learning for all have been marginalised and neglected. The current turn of political attention to issues of planetary environmental sustainability and to global societal transformation and interconnectedness raises further questions and prospects. Two United Nations’ publications in 2015: UNESCO’s Rethinking Education: toward a global common good? and of the United Nations’ Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development pose intersecting concerns for lifelong learning and environmental sustainability. This article engages with those questions in particular regard to the role of adult learning and education. It discusses a field study of non-formal adult education in Ghana. The field study contributes evidence that resiliently humanistic conceptions and practices of non-formal adult education practically succeed to foster transformation, development and human flourishing. That effective humanism gives credence to the ambitiousness of UNESCO and UN agenda for transformation and sustainability and informs international debates.

Keywords:

• Humanistic lifelong learning
• sustainable development goals
• Ghana
• empowerment

Notes

1. We wish to note that the imprecision in stating numbers of persons and sites visited is due to the real-world features of the field study. In brief, on hearing of our visit to their villages or learning venues (many hours’ drive from cities), very many people gathered around us, the researchers. Many wanted to tell their stories, show us photographs and illustrations of diverse documentation to indicate benefits and developmental experiences. Interviews, which are more precisely described as ‘research conversations,’ typically took place in the presence of groups of people. Adult learners formed organic, spontaneous, ‘focus groups’. To the researchers, rich and thick data came rapidly and from diverse directions. We took handwritten field notes and photographs.

2. In the case of rural Ghana communities, worst forms of child labour refers to 5–14 year-olds working in the agricultural sector including in land clearing, using machetes and harvesting hooks, working in the vicinity of pesticide spraying, and carrying heavy loads in the production of cocoa and palm oil.

3. Details of ILO-IPEC CCP can be found at http://www.ilo.org/ipec/Informationresources/WCMS_IPEC_PUB_27315/lang--en/index.htm. The Ghana intervention was implemented over a 44-month period ending in April 2014 in 40 communities across seven districts in the Western, Central and Eastern Regions of Ghana. Its effort to eliminate child labour also sought to promote community-led holistic development initiatives in education, health, infrastructure, livelihood and improved technical capacity.