Adult education in the Americas: Failed plans, fulfilled dreams

Transcription

1 Adult education in the Americas: Failed plans, fulfilled dreams Claudio de Moura Castro 1 When authors write aboud the moribund nature of most traditional programs of adult education we may wonder whether it is indeed dead or we are looking for it at the wrong place. This essay proposes that adult education is well and was reinvented on the go by people who never heard the term or read the books proposing it. In fact, it happened everywhere, except where it was supposed to happen, namely, the adult education centers of the governments. I. The UNESCO s Conference on Adult Education: Dismal impressions and failed plans This essay takes two milestones in adult education and sets the discussion around them. It takes the publication of the book Learning to Be as the launching pad for the movement in 1970 and a recent Unesco conference on the theme as an opportunity to take stock of what happened during the interval. In 1972 UNESCO assembled a team of wise men, lead by Edgard Faure, to think about the future of education. The result was the vastly popular Learning to Be. The book put forward the idea of lifelong education and gave it its blessings. Schooling should not end once and for all. Adults should have access to education, no matter what their age. From this meeting emerged several beliefs and slogans which survived for decades. In 1997, UNESCO again focuses one of its mammoth conferences on adult education. Around two thousand participants gathered in Hamburg to take stock of the status of their lifelong avocation of lifelong education. Present were the hard core adult educators, bureaucrats of adult education and interest groups promoting the theme. Practically all countries in the world sent their cadres in charge of adult education. For those who were present the author included - it was hard to avoid the nostalgia and melancholy of a meeting to celebrate a revolution that did not take place. We heard of budgets cuts, lack of visibility and centrality for the theme in ministries of education. Primary education certainly took the limelight in many countries and little energy was left for adult education. Another sad dimension of the event was the modest when not outright disappointing level of many presentations. 1 The author is the Chief Educational Advisor of the Interamerican Development Bank. His colleagues Larry Wolff and J. C. Navarro offered useful suggestion. Yet, the and opinions expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect their perspectives or an official position of the Bank.

2 A special issue of Norrag News took this conference as a special theme. 2 This booklet conveys the flavor of the meeting both in the tone of just about all authors and in specific statements. For instance: The draft text commits the conference to a huge number of things, but not to a great deal that is very time bound and specific (K. King) (Adult education remains)... Under-researched and under-evaluated (J. Oxenham) One of the most problematic dimensions of adult education and training are the numbers (K. King) Although nonformal education was a concept owned by adult educators, they didn t own or have responsibility for the millions of people who were claimed as recipients of nonformal education It is difficult to see any overall sense of donor commitment to the area of adult learning or adult education (Fordham)...The resources going towards the divisions or departments of adult, non-formal or continuing education in most countries are actually falling...adult education in the vast majority of countries does not enjoy a high priority on the national agenda. It is generally underfunded and understaffed and remains the poor relation of the education family (F. Mayor) The moribund nature of most traditional programs... (S. Scheaffer) The chair... declared incredulously that the profession seemed to have learned no more than it knew in the 1970s (J. Oxenham) It has not developed evidence to enable even a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis (J. Oxenham) A cynic, however, could suggest that the harmony of the occasion has something to do with the comfortable assurance of all politicians present that the rethoric and prescriptions will remain just words and little action will be expected to follow (L. Brown) These scattered quotes do not bode well for the future of adult or lifelong education. Even though most of the authors are sympathetic to the pleads, the overall tone of the publication captures the same perceptions the present author derived from the event. Were them to be taken literally, the future prospects would be dismal indeed. Is adult education dead or are we looking for it at the wrong place? The main contention of this paper is that, at least in the Americas, lifelong and adult education are alive and vibrant. But it does not take place where the UNESCO conference would have us believe. Faure and his colleagues formulated elegantly and eloquently the concepts of lifelong education. Educators 2 Norrag News, The Fifth International Conference on Adult Education, editor Kenneth King, no.21 (August All quotes which follow were taken from this same publication.

3 around the world took it up on earnest and decided that they had to do it. To a significant extent they failed, as strongly suggested by the tone an content of the Hamburg conference. But something curious happened. Adult education and lifelong education were reinvented on the go by people who never heard of Faure of Learning to Be. Many actors reinvented it, spontaneously, without knowing the concept existed or that it had become an orthodoxy in some milieus. The funds do not come from the budgets one would have thought. These actors never heard that something was happening in Hamburg in the summer of They were not invited to the Hamburg conference, nor were they acknowledged by the participants. 3 The thinkers who dreamed of lifelong learning would be disappointed that those who took their advice failed to secure the means to implement it. But they would have been happy to know that it is for real and thriving and would be even more surprised that their advice was largely ignored by those who implemented it. The concept is so powerful that it was reinvented by thousands of actors, some of them hardly connected to regular education and to education ministries. Lifelong education is alive, well and it is a huge enterprise. II. Where is lifelong education taking place? As suggested above, lifelong education or adult education - the difference between the two concepts is being largely ignored, for the purposes of the present paper - came from unexpected sources. In some cases, it results from the stubborn refusal of students to leave school after they become adults. In others, adults captured education institutions conceived for the youth. But in equally important cases, lifelong education is not being offered at education institutions. Furthermore, private and proprietary institutions have taken up a large share of the effort, for reasons that have little to do with the original motivations of the original plans. In what follows, the different manifestations of adult education are presented. The classification is arbitrary and imperfect. It merely tries to organize the scattered efforts to educate and train adults in the Americas. Due the scarcity of research and data, most evidence comes from the United States and Brazil, countries with which the author is more familiar. But one would expect the situation of other countries not to be much different. It may be interesting to notice that by contrast to Europe, the United States and Latin America have two characteristics in common which are relevant for the present paper. They share systems of education which have flaws, are less integrated and less managed from the top (if not in theory, at least in practice, in the case of Latin America). They also have governments with more entropy and more ambiguities in the division of roles. In some respects, they have less powerful governments than Europe does. A. When education takes too long, it becomes adult education 3 The Norrag authors take notice of the dissonance but do not emphasize it.

4 The poor quality of most education systems in Latin American results in frequent repetitions. When education was less important, or at least considered less important, students would soon be discouraged and drop out. Yet, increasingly students and their parents perceive that education is the passport to good jobs and modern society. Hence, they refuse to leave school. They become older and eventually reach adulthood. This refusal to leave school, despite high repetition rates results in an increasing share of students remaining in school after reaching 18 years of age. A case in point is Brazil which displays a combination of poor quality schools and a strong drive of students to move higher in the education ladder. As a result, more than half of the secondary school students are technically adults. Another consequence of this long permanence in school is that more than half of the secondary students attend evening courses. Sometimes they leave school and return later to finish their secondary degrees. Often, they have already jobs when they do it, explaining the large expansion in evening programs. In the Brazilian case, adults can bypass regular secondary schools and take a compact version of secondary education designed for adults and leading to public examinations which grants two diplomas which are legally equivalent to primary and secondary degrees, respectively. This possibility has generated a large number of private institutions to offer courses preparing for these examinations. A very interesting development along these lines comes from the Federation of Industries of São Paulo. After noticing the large proportion of workers who were returning to evening school to finish their degrees, many firms offered to pay their schooling fees. In order to avoid the low quality of the available programs and to save time, it commissioned from the Roberto Marinho Foundation (which is part of the Globo Network) a distance education program to prepare their workers for the examination. This became Telecurso 2000, the successor of the old Telecurso which had been broadcast by television for two decades. The new and innovative program is broadcast by Globo and education TVs throughout the country and the written materials are sold in newsstands. Several million people watch the program with different degrees of commitment to the examination - some just for the fun, since the program is lively and amusing. But in addition, enterprises and other organizations maintain tele-classrooms with instructors following the students. At present, students are formally enrolled in these classrooms. 4 By the same token, higher education is essentially adult education, also in the United States where the average age of students keeps increasing. 5 In Brazil, the mean age of students is close to 30 years and 70% work. The pattern of finishing secondary, finding a job and subsequently returning to evening higher education has become the predominant path. Not surprisingly, most course offerings are in the evenings. Daytime students attend elite public universities while the majority attend private school which often only operate in the evenings. An dramatic example of this spontaneous shift to adult education is given by the Pacheco branch of the Argentinian Technological University. Being an industrial town, above 95% of the students attend evening 4 Contrast that to an ambitious program run by the First Lady and which, as a result of great efforts, has been able to enroll 30,000 5 Forty two percent of the higher education students have between 24 and 64 years of age

5 courses and work during the day. Only a few scattered girls are to be found in the few classes held at daytime. The open universities, pioneered by the United Kingdom, have mushroomed around the world and Latin America is no exception, despite the strong objection of education lobbies in many countries. The United States has a wide range of initiatives, none standing out as much bigger than the others. Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela have distance universities. Internet offers an new avenue for distance education but the numbers are still modest. The situation with post-graduate schools is even more skewed towards middle-age adults. Most students return to universities to take graduate degrees after several years of professional life. This is true in the United States, as well as in Latin America. To sum up, secondary education increasingly becomes adult education in less developed countries. But both in rich and poor nations, higher and post-graduate education is becoming a second chance education, sometimes more often than a natural continuation of school life. B. Extension courses: the official lifelong education To a greater or lesser extent, higher education institutions offer extension courses. In the United States, the course catalogs for the extension courses are several times thicker than those describing regular offerings. In some cases, these courses are considered a cash cow for institutions that have difficulties in competing for regular students. When we consider that many American community colleges enroll each year the equivalent of 20% of the population of the towns where they are located, it becomes easy to conclude that adult education is a booming business. In fact, since these courses are short, they enroll several times more students than their regular courses. Latin America is far from reaching the extraordinary enrollment in extension courses observed in the United States. Yet, there is much going on and there are good reasons to think that this is a growing business. More and more higher education institutions are offering extension courses, often for the same reasons that drive their American counterparts: increasing revenues. In fact, leading business schools have taken this route. IESA, in Venezuela has 300 hundred postgraduate students, no under-graduates and 6000 extension students enrolled in its short management courses. Business schools in Peru and Costa Rica have taken the same route. Here, as elsewhere in this paper, we are dealing with unknown numbers, uncollected statistics and an overall penumbra over these vibrant activities which remain at the margin of official interest and monitoring. By the same reasons that the Hamburg conference did not acknowledge the existence of these initiatives, they also remain under-researched and uncounted by official and unofficial agencies. C. Training and retraining for jobs

6 Pre-employment training predominantly caters to youth leaving school or is an integral part of academic education. Hence, it would not be classified as adult education. However, due to a number of reasons, including the difficulties of matching training to jobs, there is a progressive shift in training programs, from youth to mature adults and from pre-employment to in-service training. In the United States, where pre-employment training is not organized and structured as in Europe, the supply is erratic and often inadequate. High schools are expected to offer vocational training and they do indeed include a considerable variety of trade courses in their programs. However, these courses tend to be amateurish and not conducive to the systematic a preparation of skilled workers equivalent to what we observe in Europe. To compensate for this casual and heterogeneous system, the United States has a vast array of training programs geared to adults and young adults. High schools and Community Colleges offer many evening courses opened to local residents and focussing on a broad range of subjects. Many of them are in the traditional trades, such as automechanics, welding, electricity, wood-work and construction trades. But in addition, office technology has become a popular area, with courses in computing, accounting, opening business, secretarial and so on. Equivalent offers come from municipalities and other government agencies. Immigrants are frequent clients of these courses. Most Latin American countries have structured systems of training, almost all of them inspired by the SENAI, SENA and INA models. These are independent systems, offering training outside the regular education system and funded from a levy on the payroll. In the past, most offerings were pre-service training to youth. Progressively, however, enrollment of adults increased and the same happened with in-service training. At present, over three fourths of the funds, if not more are allocated to activities which could be easily considered adult education, since the clients are adults and take the courses while employed. In Brazil, every year, around three million people take courses in one of these institutions. One of the new agencies in charge of training for the trucking industry has rented time on a satellite and beams eight hours a day of courses to the employees of transportation firms. Reception is done at classrooms in transportation companies and presently reach more than employees. In the recent past, many ministries of labor have created training programs geared to young unemployed adults. In Chile, funded by an IDB loan, the Projecto Joven pioneered a new model of contracting courses with private or public institutions, conditioning the contracts to the existence of jobs or internships at the end of the course. A similar program is in operation in Argentina and others are to follow. Brazil has a similar program sponsored by the Ministry of Labor and in a period of less than two years it has trained more than workers. A huge and little studied area is health training which reaches numbers which are staggering in many countries. There are countless health education campaigns and training programs, promoting preventive health practices and changes in behaviour. Unions also offer adult courses but, thus far, the numbers are modest. One exception would be the construction trades in the United States which operate very large apprenticeship and occupation certification programs. The armed forces of most countries and, in particular, the United States, offer much training to enlisted soldiers. The budgets of the American armed

7 forces for training has been estimated at thirty billion dollars and a large share of pilots, mechanics and electronic technicians in that country have received their training from the armed forces. In Brazil, most airplane mechanics received their training in the Air Force. Countries like the United States have a thriving proprietary market for training. Areas such as office technology, secretariat, computers and a multitude of short courses geared to the service sector are the object of hundreds of courses in any major city. Exactly the same happens in Latin America where in any downtown city the signs for courses are as abundant as pharmacies or bars. In addition to the areas mentioned above, English language training is a popular subject. The magnitude of this effort remains unmeasured. Gabriel Carron made a few attempts to quantify this effort and initial counts in major capitals indicated numbers such as two to three thousand schools. These are the typical second story schools in the downtown areas, with big fabric signs outside, advertising their courses. As one could expect, the quality is varied, ranging from serious and decent to fly-by-night operations, often closed down by the police - it is interesting to notice that also in the United States many of these schools have collisions with the law. Be that as it may, they offer services which people are willing to purchase, year after year. It is unreasonable to expect that consumers - and they are adults - would take such courses if they were completely ineffective. There are countless proprietary training programs in all areas. A typical example would be the Educational Institute which last year trained employees of 16,000 hotels around the world. A variant of the proprietary training are the consulting firms which cover the upscale market. They focus on management, finances, business law issues, quality control and more recently, total quality and ISO These are usually expensive programs, paid not by trainees themselves but by enterprises which increasingly prefer to outsource the training for their employees. Again, in the more advanced countries of the hemisphere this is a big business which remains unaccounted for. Like their more modest counterparts, there are no statistics and no listings of these sophisticated and expensive operations. Major players in the proprietary training business are the correspondence schools. Some are local branches of American schools but the majority is local. They offer radio and TV repair, drafting, sewing, embroidering, electricity and more recently, computers. Like their second-story counterparts, they have low status and deserve little respect from highbrow authors and public authorities - both in the United States and Latin America. Yet, they perform a social function, particularly for those who live far away from presential schools. It has been estimated that more than three million people have graduated from the major two Brazilian correspondence schools. Research conducted by the present author indicates that they are very cost effective for the students who graduate. 6 One would expect the Internet to become a major force in such training, stand-alone or in conjunction with printed materials or personal encounters. This is already happening in the United States and we should expect countries like Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Costa Rica to follow the same path. 6 Lucia Guaranys and Claudio de Moura Castro, Ensino por Correspondência: Uma estratégia de desenvolvimento educacional no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, IPEA, 1979)

8 D. Employer s training There is at least as much learning taking place at the work site as in regular schools. If we were to consider on-the-job learning as adult education it would muddle the discussion even though that in the United States it has been estimated that 70% of the learning taking place in firms is informal. What concerns us here is the training which results from a deliberate and structured efforts to promote learning. In countries like Germany, a large proportion of the training effort takes place during the days the apprentice spends working - under the supervision of a meister. But this is not the usual pattern anywhere in the Continent. What concerns us in this essay are the organized training programs firms offer to their employers. The traditional formula was the training center attached to the firm. All large firms had one of those, offering all specialties which could not be found in the market. For instance, the firm would try to hire the best trained tool and die maker and would then offer him the additional training required to bring him to the performance expected. The tendency now is to outsource training, to boost on-the-job training and to downsize the training department. That, of course, does not mean less training but a different way of offering training. There is presently a strong tendency for firms to use information technology to deliver their training. From IBM s two satellites beaming training around the world to its staff to videotapes in less formidable enterprises, it seems that the new media are taking over industry. Videos and CD Roms are becoming more and more usual as means to deliver training inside enterprises. Available evidence is scant but trade fairs suggest a vigorous production of training materials using the new media. Probably the most spectacular development along the lines of enterprise training are the higher education programs created by large American enterprises. The Motorola University is well known, as is the Hamburger University created by MacDonald s and the graduate school of public policy created by the Rand Corporation. But several other large organizations have similar institutions. The total is not far from twenty. The oil company of Venezuela created two years ago a corporate university (CIED) along the lines of Motorola. Initial reports suggest that it is a well-run operation, running in nine campus and attracting professionals from other companies in the same industry. E. If customers need training, vendors will comply Training offered by vendors of equipment remains one of the least researched topics. Yet, it is important not only quantitatively but strategically. In fact, as revealed by some surveys, it tends to be the only source of training for smaller enterprises. Vendors know that their clients need to learn a lot before they can successfully deploy the new technologies they are trying to sell. At the lowest possible level, videos and short training sessions have become increasingly popular in American hardware stores. Someone who wants to tile his kitchen and feels insecure may

9 either take a two-hour course on a major hardware store or buy a video (which may come free if he buys the materials). F. Self learning and Edutainment If the role of conventional schools to develop the skills of their students to learn how to learn, it should be no surprise that a lot of learning takes place along the life of citizens who received a serious education. The magnitudes of the effort, whether measured by hours, foregone income, foregone leisure or direct expenditures in learning materials is staggering. We can have an idea of the effort if we consider that a very significant part of the titles published in the United States are of the do-it-your-self or how-to-do category. In this respect, it is necessary to consider the role of the American public libraries which are uniques institutions, even compared to wealth and education-rich European countries. Every little town and every corner of big towns have their own libraries with all the usual magazines, reference books, how-to-do books, classics, as well as helpful librarians and functional systems of cataloguing their publications. One could well imagine that everything else pales, compared to the self-learning effort in mature societies. But there is a lot more that is not strictly self learning. Television and computers have created a new category of activities sometimes called edutainment to connote the combination of education with entertainment. With the popularization of cable TV and satellites, the number of channels multiplies and allows for greater specialization and lower costs. This has lead to the appearance of channels dedicated to different pursuits such as sports, films and news. At the same time, some channels specialized in this mixture of culture, education and entertainment. Discovery and The Learning Channel are typical examples of this new model. There are all the reasons in the world to believe that this is lifelong education at its best. The programs are rarely targeted to professionals in any particular area - with the possible exception of channels for the medical profession. Instead, they may aim at a general audience which wants more intellectually sophisticated entertainment, such as archeology, history, geography, science and technology. Programs such as James Burke s Connections offer an intriguing version of the history of science and technology. Documentaries about the petroleum industry or the life of interesting or important people are also in-between education and pure entertainment. On a more pedestrian or practical vein, the cable channels have produced a large number of programs on cooking and on wood working and household repairs. These have become genres on their own, with different characters and styles of presentation competing for the preference of the Saturday viewers. If, as the French insist, culinary is culture, the impact of these programs on American eating habits has been considered as earthshaking. Julia Child alone, continuously in the air since for more then two decades, is responsible for a major transformation of middle class cuisine and for the creation of a novel style of presenting how-to-do programs which has many followers. This Old House breaks ground on the do-it-yourself area and is followed by many others. Car Talk, a radio program sponsored by PBS, answers phone questions of listeners who have problems with their automobiles. A firm called The Teaching Company tracks the very best university lecturers in the country and hires them to record their master performances in video-

10 tape, giving the average citizen access to the most superlative lectures on Shakespeare,, greek theater, modern philosophy or how to study. The widespread diffusion of television in Latin America makes it a privileged channel for information and education. Educational channels have been around for a long time, not always with much success. The formula is not easy. When they go a little too heavy on the culture and education end, they lose audience. When they go stronger on the commercial side, their raison d être becomes less clear and the compete poorly with the big networks. In addition, being public bureaucracies in an area which is not critical makes them vulnerable to spoils politics and to inefficiency. The big networks are wary of getting into more serious programs, because it may be costly in terms of audience. In an interview, the president of Antenne 1, of France, complained that when he decided to have Cyrano de Bergerac on the evening of the 31st of December he had the lowest audience ever. Since the company has to break even, he could hardly repeat this highbrow choice. The Globo Network broadcasts Telecurso 2000 from 6:15 to 7:00 in the morning. This is the best they can do in a network which at prime time may have audiences reaching over 50 million spectators. This broadcast is meant to allow interested parties to record the program to show later during the day. However, the program Globo Rural shown at 9:00AM is a winner. This program which reaches close to seven million viewers 7 teaches layman and professional farmers alike how to deal with a multitude of problems encountered in farming. It may teach how to harvest honey from the hives, how to reduce losses from handling banana crops or how to remove ticks from cattle. No one ever dared to face the arduous task of estimating the impact of this program on Brazilian agriculture productivity. Yet, the high quality of the programs and the huge number of people from all walks of life watching it suggest that the impact is not negligible. A similar program called Great Ideas and Small Business applies the same how-to-do philosophy to the creation and management of small business and seems to be quite popular - although not to the same level as Globo Rural. The new satellite channels pave the way to dedicated education channels operated by commercial networks. This is a new chapter in edutainment TV. Venezuela, Brazil and other countries are just beginning to operate commercial TV channels entirely dedicated to education. Yet, they do not go the way of the American education TVs, operated by colleges and universities which are slow moving, show cheap programs and talking head classes. These new channels try to do education without being heavy and boring. They spend lavishly like their broadcast counterparts in the production of educational or semi-educational programs and give a quick pace to everything that is shown. They thread a delicate path between the boring and heavy pure education programs and commercial TV with its exhilarating speed and quick succession of images. It is not quite The Learning Channel model, since they are true education channels. But they try to keep a light-hearted soap-opera style while doing education. The other noteworthy trend is in computers and internet. CD Roms and internet are true learning tools and many people have understood it and use them intensely. Even in Latin America, the number of internet connections grows at unimaginable speeds. The practical uses of internet are 7 Estimated by extrapolating to the countries the audience from two major cities.

11 not ignored by a large proportion of subscribers, even though chat rooms and remain the most widespread use. All these development are pathbreaking advances in lifelong education. They have an incredible penetration in society and they offer endless possibilities. If we were to compare their budgets and impact with the activities performed by the participants of the Hamburg conference the difference would reach more than one order of magnitude. By using direct interviews with adults, Paul Belanger from Unesco found that in the United States about 40% of the adult population is attending some form of education or training program (the figure reaches 50% for Sweden). The same survey also found that there are more adult learners than children in school in several OECD countries (this does not take into account the intensity of the effort of youth compared to adults) 8 III. Did UNESCO invite the wrong crowd to Hamburg? This paper describes a revolution that is surreptitiously happening. Lifelong education is alive, kicking and still growing. In fact, despite the lack of reliable data and often even unreliable it is an enormous enterprise, spreading across regular schools, proprietary institutions, different public bureaucracies, the media and, last but not least, the internet. It could be bigger than regular education but that is just a wild guess. Neither are there data to be compared nor do we have agreed definitions on what really is lifelong education. Thus, for all practical purposes, lifelong education is a strong presence in all societies of the Continent. Not only the rich countries but all of them seem to have embarked on different forms of lifelong or adult education. Yet, it took place where it was not expected to and it failed where it was supposed to happen. None of the actors discussed in this paper were present at Hamburg. And these are the people who have made lifelong education stronger and more indented in our life than the people gathered at Place Fontenoy to write Learning to Be could have imagined, even in their most utopian dreams. This effort is not coordinated and is not coordinable. There is no planning, no blueprint, no governance. It is a form of anarchy, perhaps an organized anarchy as Martin Trow suggested. The systems adjust and readjust by the force of markets, quasi-markets and random events. There is little if any quality control and the chances of advances in this area are slim, hence, caveat emptor. The best that one can expect within the traditions of government of Latin America and the United States is that some branches of the government can try to understand this creative cachophony and find where the gaps and distortions are. Perhaps they can muster the political will to add something here and there, where some glaring distortions are encountered. By contrast, most of the people present at the UNESCO conference were on the losing end of adult education, even though they were the ones who were entrusted with the lifelong education revolution. But they seem to constitute a closed group, which prefers to remain isolated from the 8 Paul Bélanger and Albert Tuijnman, New Patterns of Adult Learning: a Six Country Comparative Study (Amsderdam: Elsevier/Pergamon, 1997)

12 powerful forces of society which lead the disjointed lifelong education that is changing the world. This outcome is not without consequences. And, in particular, it is not without equity implications. The Hamburg adult education had a much stronger preoccupation with equity. Its immediate clientele are the have-nots. Their target is the adult education for the poor who missed altogether the first chance. They fight for popular education, the sort that Paulo Freire promoted. Their just and justifiable goal is adult literacy. This is what, to a large extent, failed as discussed before and as documented in the NORRAD publication. What bloomed was a lifelong education for the affluent, for the modest and for the almost poor. The lower end remained as dispossessed as it has always been. In the richer countries, the vast majority can get a lot or something from the existing lifelong education. In the United States, the expenditures are so massive that there is something for just about everybody. In the poorer countries a large share of society can benefit from it but the excluded are not few. Charity and equity failed. The markets and the social dynamic impelled by the politically vocal groups of society won. We are better off with what we have than without it. In fact, the majority is a lot better off with this middle-class lifelong education. But the poor remain illiterate and unable to find the lifelong education promised by Faure. What are the lessons? The sad lesson is that the dispossessed are the target of programs which are also dispossessed a dismal but realistic conclusion. It seems difficult to believe that the traditional programs will be rejuvenated and come again to the forefront. But a few constructive suggestion are also possible. The use of media such as radio and television allows for very low cost programs with proven effectiveness and reaching numbers which are many times larger than the conventional methods. In fact, some of the programs described above do reach the poor and reach extraordinary numbers, millions in some cases. Helping the barely literate poor with some of these programs seems more promising than the efforts at basic adult literary. This is not an endorsement of the chronic inequity of the situation but an attempt to understand the present configuration of politics, policies and the budgets that result from it. Created: March 21, Version: December 27, 2007 file name: Adult Education Stockholm