Education permanente

Abstract

We have heard a lot, both at this conference and before it, of the needs for education permanente, of the institutional opposition inertia to its introduction, and about ways and means whereby the existing structures of higher and adult education might be modified to enable everybody to take advantage of so much of what is offered as may satisfy his needs at any time. All this has been in the realm of theory; a theory that states both that structures will adapt in the face of national arguments and that people will willingly turn to them when they learn of their availability. Neither of these things do I believe to be true. Ollerenshaw (1972) has commented on the tendency of institutions to start serving an outside purpose, develop a momentum which is not readily adaptable to external change in the outside needs, and then become exclusively concerned with their internal needs, enthusiasm and skills; these combine to promote the growth and status of the institution itself, regardless of manpower requirements or of what happens to the products of the process. Thus colleges come to exist to serve themselves, parasites upon the society that pays for them. Conflicts between their departments for more resources are resolved by appealing for bigger budgets for an insatiably growing process. The outcome of such demands must eventually be that they can no longer be borne, and this may be the moment when a well planned and alternative scheme may have an opportunity to receive the more modest funds that it would need. Education permanente has always been seen not as a programme following end-on to school, but as one essentially including all education from birth to the grave. At the present it is a person's experience of primary, and particularly of secondary education that determines his openness, let alone enthusiasm, for continuing education beyond school. Schools still preponderantly require the child to be submissive and to absorb learning from a teacher, and are aimed to train children to pass exams which admit those that succeed in doing so to higher education, where they continue to look for direction and leadership to enable them to pass higher exams. The children that are not considered suitable for these exams are therefore convinced that they are educational failures,