Beyond Schooling: The Role of Adult and Community Education in Postcolonial Change

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Abstract

This chapter analyses issues in the practice and improvement of adult education in decolonizing societies, by developing a socio-political theory of literacy and literacies. Using this framework it compares contrasting experiments in adult basic and popular education during the Grenada Revolution and after its collapse. From a postcolonial perspective, it discusses the potential—or lack thereof—of adult education influenced by 'socialist' and 'capitalist' ideas to make a difference to social and national development. Do the varying approaches provide catch-up schooling on the cheap? or do they instead help participants play a political role in challenging the structures of injustice, inefficiency, and dysfunctionality entrenched in most societies? In spite of some strengths, both models have flaws which need to be overcome to meet today's imperatives. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how far current adult education strategies in the wider Latin American region can challenge the tradition of separating education for dominant literacy from education for subordinate literacy. To do so, structures of adult education must help shape material change, involve learners in pressure-group politics, and promote an alternative curriculum which engages learners with politics and culture.