BY MULUGETA GUDETA
During the inaugural ceremony of the Abrehot public library late last year, it was disclosed that most of the mistakes that are being committed by politicians- or anybody in any sector of social life for that matter were due to the lack of knowledge on the part of the so-called public leaders in any field of endeavor. However as ignorance of the law does not absolve anyone from liability in case of criminal act, lack of knowledge does not absolve one from being held accountable in case of infringements in public functions. The liability may range from moral to criminal accountability in the case of infringement or neglect of responsibilities.
Historical records bear witness to the fact that a long time ago before the skills of writing and reading were invented; people lived in an environment in which they struggled to survive against natural forces, animals, and other humans. “To survive, preliterate people developed skills that grew into cultural and educational patterns. For a particular group’s culture to continue into the future, people had to transmit it, or pass it on, from adults to children. The earliest educational processes involved sharing information about gathering food and providing shelter; making weapons and other tools; learning language; and acquiring the values, behavior, and religious rites or practices of a given culture.
Primitive learning consisted of oral transmission of knowledge from elders to children. According to Encarta Encyclopedia, “Through direct, informal education, parents, elders, and priests taught children the skills and roles they would need as adults. These lessons eventually formed the moral codes that governed behavior. Since they lived before the invention of writing, preliterate people used an oral tradition, or storytelling, to pass on their culture and history from one generation to the next. By using language, people learned to create and use symbols, words, or signs to express their ideas. When these symbols grew into pictographs and letters, human beings created a written language and made the great cultural leap to literacy.”
Early formal adult education activities focused on single needs such as reading and writing. Many early programs were started by churches to teach people to read the Bible. When the original purpose was satisfied, programs were often adjusted to meet more general educational needs of the population. Libraries, lecture series, and discussion societies began in various countries during the 18th century. As more people experienced the benefits of education, they began to participate increasingly in social, political, and occupational activities. By the 19th century, adult education was developing as a formal, organized movement in the Western world.
According to the same sources, education, as we know it now is “a system of formal teaching and learning as conducted through schools and other institutions. Levels of education in modern societies can go from preschools to colleges and universities.” On the other hand, sources indicate that Adult Education consists of all forms of schooling and learning programs in which adults participate. Unlike other types of education, adult education is defined by the student population rather than by the content or complexity of a learning program. It includes literacy training, community development, university credit programs, on-the-job training, and continuing professional education. Programs vary in organization from casual, incidental learning to formal college credit courses. Institutions offering education to adults include colleges, libraries, museums, social service and government agencies, businesses, and churches.
While committing mistakes is an inevitable part of being human, why educated people are prone to making serious mistakes is something that needs further investigation. Uneducated people also make mistakes in their personal or social life but their mistakes are relatively less dangerous than those made by responsible members of society whose thoughts and actions impact a wider range of national life or determine the fates of many people and communities. The metaphor often used to describe uneducated people compares them to those suffering from blindness, that is to say from mental intellectual blindness.
If being educated does not protect one from making mistakes it would be logical to assume that uneducated people need of any form of education to come out of their state of mental blindness that may sometimes be more dangerous than physical blindness. Adult education is therefore conceived as a mechanism through which adults who have missed the formal education system do some catch up by involving themselves in some form of adult education and be able to overcome their mental constrain to a healthier, happier and fuller and more productive life. That is why the right to education, formal or informal, is described as one of the key features of human rights.
Broadly conceived, adult education is defined by Encyclopedia Britannica “as being distinct from child education, is a practice in which adults engage in systematic and sustained self-educating activities in order to gain new forms of knowledge, skills, attitudes, or values. It can mean any form of learning adults engage in beyond traditional schooling, encompassing basic literacy to personal fulfillment as a lifelong learner and to ensure the fulfillment of an individual.
In particular, adult education reflects a specific philosophy about learning and teaching based on the assumption that adults can and want to learn, that they are able and willing to take responsibility for the learning, and that the learning itself should respond to their needs.”
In this age of fast technological development, economic, political cultural and social developments have long become inconceivable without the existence of a population that has acquired the basic skills of reading and writing without which access to advanced knowledge is virtually impossible. In this age of technological and communication advancements informal or adult education is more important than in the past in enabling young adults who missed formal education get access to informal or functional education in order to catch up successfully with the time lost during the early stage of one’s life. Adult education or the teaching of reading and writing as well as doing simple arithmetical exercises is the backbone of any adult education program in any country in the world.
In Ethiopia, adult education started during the Haile Selassie government with foreign financial and advisory assistance from European countries like Sweden. Although adult literacy programs under the imperial regime were popular, their achievements were limited due to the relatively narrow scope of the programs and the limited number of participants. It was nevertheless a good beginning that served as a limited reference point for the program to continue under the erg regime, albeit new pretensions and similar objectives.
The Derg regime launched the National Literacy Campaign in July 1979, by announcing that “illiteracy would be removed from the urban areas of the country by 1982 and from rural Ethiopia by 1987. By the end of the12th round of the NLC in February 1985, 169 million youths and adults had been covered by the campaigners while participants had earned literacy Certificates after passing tests. The program was hugely popular and conceived as one of the key to release the human potentials of the country by making all uneducated Ethiopians beneficiaries of what was known as functional literacy.
The Derg literacy program was not only ambitious. It also used high school and university students as teachers of the literacy campaigns in the rural areas that were conducted in tandem with land reform program that was universally lauded as revolutionary and transformative. However, the program lost momentum as the country was embroiled in civil wars that claimed the attention and resources of the government. The program lost its initial energy when it was claimed a success and priorities changed in due time.
The EPRDF on its part ignored all the programs started by the Derg, including the adult literacy campaign, and started to launch its programs that claimed new priorities in accordance with its political objectives. Although the EPRDF regime was not against adult literacy programs in principle, it did nothing significant to advance it in practice. It educational program was entirely geared towards restructuring the formal educational sector and building many universities almost in every region that proved-counterproductive to the educational aspirations of the country that built numerous high schools and colleges and enrolled unprecedented numbers of students, the quality of education had sharply gone down and adult literacy was totally ignored.
As a result of this as the EPRDF built that higher levels of public education, it left the people at the bottom of it and mainly illiterate adults estimated into tens of millions of farmers, without any chance of acquiring informal or functional literacy that would help them acquire any kind of knowledge related to agriculture. As a result of this, tens of millions of farmers were left in the dark while their children collected university degrees that did not guarantee them decent jobs. The dilemma of Ethiopia’s educational system is continued to suffer from these contradictions. Cultural development is sometimes conceived as growth in the understanding of the functions of culture as factors of growth in other areas such as the economy, politics and popular values and ideas in general. This has not materialized in Ethiopia under the EPRDF.
Tens of millions of people in Ethiopia are still unable to write and read or do simple arithmetical operations as a result of the above-indicated failures of policies and management. The advent of modern communication technologies has also undermined the culture of reading among a significant number of youngsters who rather resort to social media for information and understanding rather than developing their reading skills and appetites that are the bases of solid cultural transformations and creative thinking. This kind of abhorrent attitude is also rampant among a large number of highly educated individuals who prefer the easy but erroneous ways of the social media over the more informed culture of reading books that develop the minds.
Objectively speaking, Ethiopia can be said to be going back to the Derg and the imperial times as far as adult literacy and quality of education are concerned. The past seems to be more promising than the present and the task of educational reformers are presently facing the same dilemmas that have undermined the last two regimes. These are building a solid and high quality educational system and spreading literacy to the underprivileged millions of Ethiopians in towns and the rural areas. This will not certainly be an easy task but it is doable with enormous commitment, clear objectives, the necessary financial resources and investments that are in short supply at present.
The Ethiopian Herald June 26/2022
