Performance indicators for designing lifelong learning for adults in Asia-Pacific

In our January 2008 Consultation Meeting on Lifelong Learning for Sustainable Development with 50 participants from around the country, Felice Sta. Maria (chairperson of the UNESCO NatCom for Social and Human Sciences – SHS) stated: “The existing variations of adult education in the Asia Pacific require a review to ascertain if their curricula and philosophies remain suitable to the early 21st century. Adult education will benefit from goal-oriented literacy necessary for full human and societal well being.”

She gave precise definitions of Adult Education as “the practice of teaching and educating adults”; and Lifelong Learning as “the concept that ‘it’s never too soon or too late for learning’; lifelong learning sees citizens provided with learning opportunities at all ages and in numerous contexts.” (Source: Wikipedia)

Keys to consider for designing adult education

Adult education partnered with lifelong learning can provide not only basic functional literacy for drop-out, but sustained for secondary and post-secondary graduates, as well. It can champion the learning society in environments where media, tradition, and even regulation hinder academic success, promote underachievement, and encourage anti-intellectualism or disregard for traditional wisdom and intuitive learning.

Since learning is a path towards attaining full human development and well being, learning nurtures positive capabilities and understanding of different perspectives throughout a learner’s physical, intellectual, psycho-social and spiritual life. That means the minimum of basic human needs are attained and preferably surpassed. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) enumerates basic needs as: (1) Physical survival and health; (2) Level of knowledge and understanding of one’s natural, social and cultural environment; (3) Livelihood and income meaningful to society; (4) Political freedom and the right to participate; and (5) Spiritual well being.

Robert Kegan in In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (1995, Harvard University Publishing) suggests that adults need a “qualitative transformation” of the mind to parallel the economic, political and social stages of culture. Those marginalized by the dominant society will feel alienated and may develop active hostility.

Sense of ownership

Adults may feel that they are acknowledged or unacknowledged stakeholders in development. Adult education can recognize that sense of “ownership”. Teachers, trainors and facilitators are wise to make the best use of what adult learners can and want to contribute to learning projects. Adults are attracted to programs with clear applications and results. Projects that benefit the family and the community should be considered as core activities on which to anchor adult learning experiences.

The Pagsasarili Mothercraft Literacy Twin Project for village mother and children readily attracts learning in Personal Grooming and Hygiene, Good Housekeeping, Child Care, Cooking and Nutrition, which includes a literacy course on Language, Math and Cultural Arts (Science). These courses take place in well-equipped classrooms resembling the interiors of a house.

‘Reasoning’ – The Fourth R

United Nations efforts seek to eradicate illiteracy that at its simplest includes fundamental skills in the three R’s: Reading, ‘Riting’ and ‘Rithmetic’ (numeracy). There is an advocacy that “Reasoning” be the fourth R. Additional literacies are and will be required by adults to cope well with changes that characterize the 21st century.

Felice explained, “Reasoning is essential so that stakeholders can engage in meaningful, tolerant dialogue and discussion related to family, community, national and global development. Reasoning needs a comfortable familiarity and ability to use the inductive method when gauging probability and most importantly, the scientific deductive method of inquiry. Traditional knowledge, findings from the arts and sciences must all be reckoned for their impact on decision making to critically interpret mass multi-media messages that can be confusing, prejudiced, misleading, inaccurate or false.”

Other literacies that the 21st century seems to require are: health literacy founded on fundamental science, civic and cultural literacy; computer, multi-media, digital and technical literacy; and communication literacy that teaches how to converse and otherwise express one’s opinions and ideas clearly and effectively. Adults profit from knowing that these new learnings have everyday, common practical benefits.

Adult education benefits from findings how people age

In 2000, the UNESCO NatCom’s Social and Human Sciences Committee initiated a critical review of Philippine textbooks for basic education. Commissioner Florentino Hornedo used two frameworks by which to review the materials — Theodore Meyer Green’s pedagogical basics are “directed towards the assessment of skills and development, and measured by efficiency and effectivity”, while “Wieleman’s list of significant human relations indicates attitudinal (and therefore values) orientation.”

Such critical learning frameworks, along with the Asia-Pacific’s shared international conventions, must figure in the shaping of a lifelong learning paradigm for the region’s adult education. Any educational reform strategy would include the UNESCO’s Four Pillars of Education. The Report to UNESCO by the International Commission on Education (ICE) for the 21st Century published in 1996 notes that “Each individual must be equipped to seize learning opportunities throughout life, both to broaden his or her knowledge, skills and attitudes, and to adapt to a changing, complex and interdependent world.”

Made up of 12 international expert educators, the Commission recommended that education “must be organized around four fundamental types of learning which, throughout a person’s life, will in a way be the pillars of knowledge: Learning to Know; Learning to Do; Learning to Live Together; and Learning to Be. The Report notes that the four paths of knowledge “all form a whole, because there are many points of contact, intersecting and exchanging among them.”

Lifelong learning within 100 years

Dottoressa Maria Montessori, a century ago, referred to a similar human transformation based on science. One of the great luminaries of UNESCO during its establishment in 1946, she observed the constancy of life and its hidden treasures in a psychological order from birth to adulthood.

“Learning to Be” within birth to six years when a child’s inner teacher unconsciously enables him to speak and walk alone, as well as be scholastically trained in a preschool. From 6 to 12 years old, children all over the world exhibit not only an enormous reasoning power, but moral sensitivity, which can be the stage of “Learning to Learn”. Meantime, adolescence aged 12 to 18 find the teenager’s intelligence waning giving way to creativity and intense desire for economic independence or “Learning to Work”. Young adults, 18 to 24, start acquiring a career and a family so readily ‑— “Learning to Live Together in Harmony with others”. This last pillar stretches to the “second map of adulthood”.

Gail Sheehy, a sociologist and author of bestseller Passages, refers to Lifelong Learning within the average lifespan of 100 years divided into four parts or 25 years. Pillars I, II, III and IV as the first 25 years of life or the Formative Years. Whereas, Learning to Live in Harmony with Others stretches out to the rest of adulthood. Sheehy describes the period of 25 to 50 years, as adults master their career, while from 50 to 75 mentoring of others take place, and the last quarter of 75 to 100 years, one leaves a legacy to mankind.

Who we are, how we think, what we do

There are 50 psychology classics of the 20th century. Among them are the following with simple classifications clustered under “Why We Are How We Are – The Study of Personality and the Self”: Isabel Briggs Myers, Gift Differing; Hans Eysenck, Dimensions of Personality; Anna Freud, The Ego and Mechanisms of Defence; Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts; Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude; and Gail Sheehy, Passages.

“Why We Do What We Do – Great Thinkers on Human Motivation”: Alfred Adler, Understanding Human Nature; Eric Hoffer, The True Believer; Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority; B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

“Why We Love the Way We Do – The Dynamics of Relationships”: Eric Berne, Games People Play; Harry Harlow, The Nature of Love; Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person.

“Working at Our Peak – Creative Power and Communication Skills”: Robert Bolton, People Skills; Robert Cialdini, Influence; Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind; Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence.

In the meantime, we all need a personal theory of what makes people tick. To survive and thrive, we have to know who and what we are, and to be canny about the motivations of others. The common route to this knowledge is life experience, but we can advance our appreciation of the subject more quickly through reading. Some people gain insights from fiction, others from philosophy. But psychology is the only science exclusively devoted to the study of human nature, and its popular literature – surveyed in this collection – aims to convey this vital wisdom.

The performance indicators in our lives

As we review our own life and the lives of our parents, relatives and friends, including our children, we become aware that the psychological interpretation of the four pillars of UNESCO’s 21st Century Learning are actually the constant chapters everyone goes through from “cradle to grave”. These are accurate “performance indicators” of the full development of human potential.

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