The right to education - Asia Pacific Knowledge Base on Open and ...

56World <strong>education</strong> reportBox 3.1‘<strong>The</strong> whole of his life is a school for everyman’ (John Amos Comenius, 1592–1670) 1Our first wish is that all men should be educatedfully <strong>to</strong> full humanity; not any one individual, nora few nor even many, but all men <strong>to</strong>gether andsingly, young and old, rich and poor, of high andof lowly birth, men and women – in a word, allwhose fate it is <strong>to</strong> be born human beings: so thatat last the whole of the human race may becomeeducated, men of all ages, all conditions, bothsexes and all nations. . . . Just as the whole worldis a school for the whole of the human race, fromthe beginning of time until the very end, so thewhole of his life is a school for every man, fromthe cradle <strong>to</strong> the grave. . . . Every age is destinedfor learning, nor is man given other goals in learningthan in life itself.1. After whom is named a Medal sponsored by UNESCO andthe Czech Republic intended <strong>to</strong> record and promote outstandingachievements and innovations carried out in thefields of teaching and <strong>education</strong>al research.Source: John Amos Comenius, 1592–1670: Selections, pp. 97,145, Paris, UNESCO, 1957.was noted earlier in Chapter 2, international cooperationin adult <strong>education</strong> at that time was complicatedby the fact that the challenges facing adult<strong>education</strong> varied so greatly among countries: inmany of the newly independent countries themajority of adults were illiterate, which was notwithin the recent experience of countries whereadult <strong>education</strong> programmes had long been established.Moreover, among the latter there weremany different approaches <strong>to</strong> adult <strong>education</strong>,ranging from the Folk High Schools of theScandinavian countries <strong>to</strong> ‘workers’ <strong>education</strong>’ inthe former USSR, ‘further <strong>education</strong>’ in the UnitedKingdom, ‘continuing <strong>education</strong>’ in the UnitedStates and Canada, and éducation populaire inFrance. Other than the adult target group itself,there did not exist at that time a unifying principleor concept of adult <strong>education</strong> that could provideadult educa<strong>to</strong>rs working in different national circumstancesand traditions with a common ideal orpurpose, nor one that could settle the question ofadult <strong>education</strong>’s status vis-à-vis the regularmainstream <strong>education</strong> system, <strong>to</strong> which in mostcountries adult <strong>education</strong> was usually regarded asan appendage and very much as a ‘poor relation’.Prompted in part by the Second World Conferenceon Adult Education (Montreal, 1960), whichrecommended, among other things, that governmentsshould ‘regard adult <strong>education</strong> not as anaddition, but as an integral part of their nationalsystems of <strong>education</strong>’, UNESCO’s General Conferenceat its 12th Session two years later <strong>to</strong>ok upthe matter and went one step further, invitingMember States ‘<strong>to</strong> regard the various forms of ou<strong>to</strong>f-schooland adult <strong>education</strong> as an integral par<strong>to</strong>f any <strong>education</strong>al system, so that all men andwomen, throughout their lives, may have theopportunities for pursuing <strong>education</strong> conducivealike <strong>to</strong> their individual advancement and <strong>to</strong> theiractive participation in civic life and in the socialand economic development of their country’ (italicsadded).At the international level, this invitation was thegenesis of the idea of ‘lifelong <strong>education</strong>’, for itwas soon realized, as one of the leading protagonistsrecalled later, that the design of anycoherent overall strategy for the development ofout-of-school and adult <strong>education</strong> would need <strong>to</strong>consider <strong>education</strong> as a whole, as well as the successionand interrelation of its various stages overthe life-cycle (Box 3.2).<strong>The</strong> discussion and debate that ensued bothwithin UNESCO and in the wider intellectual communitywas eventually absorbed later in the decadein<strong>to</strong> a broader international discussion anddebate over the future of <strong>education</strong> generally, culminatingin the setting up in 1971 of the InternationalCommission on the Development of Education.<strong>The</strong> Commission’s report brought the ideaof ‘lifelong <strong>education</strong>’ <strong>to</strong> the attention of a wideinternational audience. It was this report <strong>to</strong>o thatwas largely responsible for the shift of focus duringthe 1970s from <strong>education</strong> <strong>to</strong> learning, as well