Education essential for change

Press, 23 August 1984, Page 16

Education essential for change

LYN HOLLAND talks to Professor Lalage Bown, the first woman in the Commonwealth to hold a university chair in adult education, and the first professor of adult education in Zambia.

Education must be available to the whole community, not locked away in institutions, according to a visiting professor in adult education, Professor Lalage Bown. Professor Bown was the first woman in the Commonwealth to hold a university chair in adult education, and the first professor of adult education in Zambia. She spent her childhood in Burma and is now director of adult and continuing education at the University of Glasgow. She is only the fourth woman to hold a chair at the university. In between Lalage Bown has worked in various African countries to establish community education programmes. She will speak at the South Pacific Lifelong Education conference in Wellington next month. The other speakers are the Chancellor of the University of Canterbury, Miss Jean Herbison, and a former Minister of Education, Mr Les Gandar. In 1949 Lalage Bown decided to go to Africa. She was a post-graduate student at Oxford University in Britain when the impending independence for many African countries offered an exciting prospect. “It was the chance to help people get power over their own destinies.”

She intended to stay only a few years, and remained for 31. The demand for education in Africa spread far beyond the university campuses. In Ghana, for instance, her car was stopped in a village during one of her frequent trips around the countryside. Villagers who knew she regularly drove through the town had erected a barricade to get her to help to establish an adult education programme for the village. A small college was eventually established, with the help of students and others from educational institutions working during their holidays. The media has proved useful in her efforts to spread information more widely. In northern Nigeria she used public television and rural newspapers to spread information about a forthcoming solar eclipse. Previous eclipses had caused widespread panic so to stop a similar terror she began an information campaign nine months before the expected eclipse. Scientific jargon was simplified, to explain to

teachers and the public that the eclipse was predictable, and that it would end. Radio messages urged the curious to watch the eclipse only by watching the reflection in a bucket of water (more readily available in Nigeria than the smoked glass New Zealanders more often use). Even a song, written in the local popular style, was written'to spread the message. The eclipse eventually passed with little or no panic. The need to get knowledge where it can be used is essential to a genuine, democratic, and socially just system, Professor Bown believes. Educationists cannot solve social problems, only socially-aware people who can think for themselves can do that. Without knowledge, the power to make the right decisions can be taken from people, she maintains. Lalage Bown cites an incident in Ghana to illustrate her point. A would-be politician came to a village to rally support, promising a midwife for every woman in the village if they supported

him. But a group of villagers who had been meeting to discuss political issues knew that the country’s resources were insufficient to make such a promise possible. It is a crude example, she points out, but the same sort of process occurs in all societies. To get real social and political change in a democracy, education is essential, she says. Universities are the most expensive part of an education system paid for by the community, so they must be open to that community. That is social justice, Professor Bown says. They offer a store of knowledge, ideas, and expertise that can be crucial to people’s lives. “You do not put a candle under a bed, you put it where it lights the room. In the same way knowledge should not be hidden away in institutions.” But community access to education can be hindered by what she calls the “intellectual arrogance” of those in educational institutions. “The idea, for instance, that what the public wants is more classes in making

pottery, valuable though these are. “There are people who want to know why they are here on this earth, and who may want to study theology, for instance.” Professor Bown admits she has made similar assumptions. Working with young unemployed people in Scottish slums she assumed they would want to learn something related to finances, or getting a job. “But they wanted to understand themselves. One youth, aged 20, who had previously painted cranes and believed he would never get a job again, wanted to understand philosophy.” Intellectual jargon can also be a barrier, making people “switch off.” A person keen to learn how we work in groups could be put off by the label “social psychology,” for instance. A study by the South East Canterbury branch of the Workers’ Educational Association seems to support Professor Bown’s claim that there is a gap between the education people want and what they get. Of the 742 people questioned, 362 were interested in some form of intellectual study. Only 22 were actually doing such study. A real need exists to educate those with power, as well as the disadvantaged and the powerless, she believes.

“It is very important to educate those who lead the regime if we are to get the people who don’t into the system.” People in educational institutions can find it difficult to establish links with decision makers. Distrust can result when they become “compartmentalised, beavering away at their own work without thinking about the constraints on them.” It is not surprising that grants then get cut, she says. In Glasgow the regional council had become antagonistic to the university’s adult education programme. No-one had bothered consulting with the council, to explain what it was trying to do, she says. She invited one of the critical councillors on to the department’s committee and he has since become one of its greatest supporters, she says. In New Zealand, Professor Bown suggests that educational institutions may be falling into the trap of under-rating how much in-, tellectual stimulus people want. But she has been impressed with the "active social consciences,” and the professionalism she has been able to observe among the network of community education volunteers.