Preserving social knowledge: integrating the social wisdom of older persons into the modern African school room.
and
Margaret Grieco,
Summary argument
Many developing countries had a tradition of viewing the old as wise and encouraging relationships between the old and young which permitted that wisdom to be transferred. Older persons were part of the education structures of traditional society. The modernisation and professionalisation of the education sector in developing countries has largely taken place within the frame of western models which remove the role of educator from the older person. Whilst children in the schoolrooms of the developing societies of the world are increasingly estranged from older persons as a source of cultural skills and identity, western societies such as Australia have begun to recruit older persons back into the school room as part of the educational team. On the basis of discussions held with older persons, children, parents and educators in Ghanaian communities, this poster explores the benefits of and opportunities for integrating older persons into the modern Ghanaian school room.
1. Introduction.
The messages from external donors are consistent:: Africa's resource base does not allow the development of comparable social policy arrangements to the West (World Bank, 1994, Apt and Grieco, 1994). According to all the various source of expertise, Africa must make the most of its informal structures such as kinship and community in resourcing its development and social survival. Yet, remarkably in the education area, both donor and government policy has largely been to attempt to replicate the expensive forms and organisation of Western education. These forms typically maximise the use of professionals and minimise the contributions and control of the community in the delivery of educational services. All too frequently they destroy rather than preserve appropriate local social knowledge. The unthinking destruction of local heritage under the banner of universal and global knowledge must now be challenged. The time has arrived both in Africa and elsewhere for community challenge to the professionalisation of all social knowledge.
Paradoxically, new global technologies can be of assistance in promoting the relocalisation of social knowledge: Ghanaian nationals and émigrés, for example, have been very active in establishing a range of cultural sources and activities on the Internet which could be used as a basis for developing local educational and social policy materials (see 'Kente connection' ). The objective is not to preserve the local in a museum type format but rather to provide the local with as active and as relevant a voice in the development of educational resources as any other perspective.
It is no part of our argument in this paper to suggest that universal primary school education is not a desirable goal for sub-Saharan Africa, we do, however, wish to call attention to the extent to which educational policy has largely been one of uncritical replication of western models and scale of education (Okpala, 1977). We also wish to call attention to the extent to which these models damage the traditional relationships between young and old, serving to marginalise older persons in a context where society is best served by their continued integration and further integration into intergenerational structures and relationships.
Education consumes a large percentage of African governments' budgets without achieving the levels of quality accomplished by those education systems which they seek to imitate. In this paper, we suggest that Africa could usefully modify some of these western models to make greater use of its locally available resources, in particular its older persons, and by doing so relieve some of the resource constraints which are presently depressing the level of African quality of education. The policy discussion around universal primary education in Africa has largely taken place without detailed ethnographic or social process research as to what takes place within the schoolroom. The focus has largely been in terms of curricula establishment, increasing enrollment numbers - most particularly that of girls (Odaga and Heneveld, 1995), building programmes and ensuring an adequate supply of teachers (Apt and Grieco, 1994b). Indeed, the focus on school building programmes without any detailed investigation of the social and educational dynamics of existing school rooms has been a key feature of the Republic of Ghana/ World Bank fcube (free compulsory universal basic education) program in Ghana.
Research which has investigated why girls drop out of school by the Centre for Social Policy Studies, University of Ghana, reveals that for many girl Ghanaian schoolchildren the experience of the schoolroom is far from a positive one (Apt and Grieco, 1995; Grieco, Apt and Turner, 1996; Apt, 1998). Creating an environment where education is a child centred experience rather than a location of discipline and boredom may very well be an important element in ensuring that public investment in education is accompanied by an adequate return at the level of achieved quality. Ensuring the quality of classroom interaction is sufficiently child friendly and stimulating may be a more important dimension in developing appropriate education systems for developing countries than the simple building of school pavilions.
Making use of the key traditional sources of knowledge within African communities, the elders or older persons, in the classroom could greatly assist in producing better adult/ student ratios in that context with major educational benefits. Evidence from African research (Apt, 1995) demonstrates the traditional importance of intergenerational arrangements in the socialisation and care of the young - older persons were viewed as the wise and as a key source of social knowledge. Modern educational arrangements have largely removed this 'knowledge' status from the indigenous old and transferred the same status onto the formally and, at least from the perspective of local communities, externally trained experts.
If the notion of bringing older African persons into the African schoolroom to assist with the educational process of the younger members of their communities appears far fetched then it is worth taking into account the changing attitudes towards the inclusion of non-professional older persons as a source of classroom expertise in the high income countries. Within Australia, there are programs which take older women into the schoolroom as part of a strategy for reducing the polarisation between young and old which the modern education system itself has brought into being. Most interestingly, in the United States, there are programs under which older persons possessing African crafts are brought into black neighbourhood schools to teach these crafts - crafts such as the production of West African kente cloth (see 'Kente connection'). And indeed, this social movement has been accompanied by the establishment of web site materials which can be brought virtually into the American classroom to guide the American child through the craft production techniques and range of textile designs of West Africa. The traditional social knowledge of West Africa is clearly viewed as having a meaning for the Afro-American cultural context: this example very clearly raises the issue of why such considerations would be of importance for Africa itself.
At the same time, and within Africa itself, attention is beginning to fall upon the need for greater community involvement in the organisation and delivery of education. In Kenya, there are educational programs which provide the community with influence over the educational syllabus rather than simply leaving it in the hands of professionals from without the community (see the education subsite of the World Bank home page for further information on this topic). The failure to involve communities in the organisation and delivery of education has consequences in low enrollment rates or other forms of educational avoidance such as absenteeism or low levels of both student motivation and parental commitment. Although, there appears to have been no formal policy discussion of the benefits of involving older Africans, and most particularly older African women in the schoolroom, the move towards greater sensitivity around the inclusion of local dimensions signalled by the Kenyan experiments indicates that there is mileage to be gained from an explicit consideration of the topic.
In the present, the major development policy agencies have not engaged to any relevant degree with the problem of ageing, or the even greater problem of gender and ageing (Apt et al. 1996; ODA, 1994), in Africa. Indeed, the World Bank does not even contain a points person covering these areas within its whole structure. The absence of professional attention to the polarisation of the relationships between old and young which follow in the wake of the development of an education system that divides the young and old in time and space as well as in access to new ideas or older skills and sources of knowledge is therefore not a surprise.
It is, however, an issue which has begun to be addressed within Africa by non governmental organisations such as Helpage Ghana. Helpage Ghana currently has a program through which older persons are present in the schoolroom, albeit on an informal basis, providing information to the younger generations about their lives, experiences and times. Similarly, Helpage Ghana is currently developing a program through which older persons will enter nursery schools and child day care centres to provide children with access to the traditional tales of the society rather than having new cohorts of children exposed only to the 'jack and jill' tales so richly supported by colourful texts produced externally.
In drawing attention to developments within Helpage Ghana, the issue is raised of how the contribution of older persons to the modern African classroom can be best enabled (Derricourt and Miller, 1992) and equally importantly how the benefits of this contribution can be best maximised through the educational policies of Africa. The African educational experience requires reevaluation in terms of its contribution to current processes of marginalising older persons, most particularly women who are often the least educated and most poorly resourced: action must be taken to preserve intergenerational social relations and their relationship to social knowledge. Resourcing the African education system through the better and more appropriate use of locally available social resources is an option which requires a more open exploration. In the absence of significant improvements in the financial resources available to fund African education, a focus upon the best use of available and appropriate relational resources represents a viable path to take.
2. Venerable voices: lessons from the past.
The evidence from Ghana is clear: traditionally older persons were well integrated into the full range of social functions within the society. With the advent of the formal education system and other related influences, older persons, and most particularly older women, are becoming increasingly marginalised in a context where there are insufficient public sector resources to resolve welfare issues in the same manner as they are resolved in high income countries. At the same time as older persons have lost their function in the educational domain, young persons frequently experience education as negative in a context where the financial resources available for providing quality education on the Western model are highly constrained. A logical solution, or at least part of a logical solution, would seem to be that of reintegrating older persons into their traditional educational role with this reintegration taking place in the schoolroom.
To move further with such an agenda there is a need to make an inventory of the skills and social knowledge which older persons would bring to the classroom. As with the American example provided, craft skills would be a good first candidate. The customary fit between locally available materials and local skills can assist in the appropriate resourcing of educational activities. Highly centralised education systems frequently ignore local variations in the availability of craft materials - ensuring flexibility in school curricula to enable the incorporation of local crafts, materials and sources of expertise is an appropriate step for educational provision in developing countries.
Exploring ways in which local education can be better linked with income earning opportunities represents a useful avenue of exploration when considering ways of including older persons in the school room. New technologies can be used to market craft goods and products produced within a more vocational frame of rural education: Internet commerce could be linked with intergenerational craft programs or projects within the education system. The separation of education from the outer world is the model of education which happened to develop within the early industrialising countries of the world - though historically this separation was not as complete as it has become in the present - but the insular model is not the only valid model and community business which involves the school room has already began to take place in the United Kingdom for example.
Farming or agricultural skills represents another area in which older persons, and older women, could make a very important contribution to the rural African education process. The evidence from Africa is that women are critical to the operation of African agriculture (Sasakawa 2000; Cleaver and Schreiber, 1994); equally, importantly the evidence is that agricultural experts have largely neglected the agricultural needs of Africa's women farmers. Involving older women in educating girls on agricultural practices and providing older women with access to new knowledge in the field of gendered agricultural practices could make a very vital contribution to improving the current situation of institutional neglect of women's agricultural needs. The school could very readily provide an important element in developing appropriate outreach arrangements for women's agriculture in Africa with consequent food security and nutritional benefits.
Traditionally within Africa communities older women were responsible for ensuring the preparing of girl children for initiation rites. Currently, many of these initiation rites are viewed as damaging to girl children both from without African society and indeed from within African society itself. Indeed, poor women villagers have recently led a social movement to end the practice of female circumcision at the local level in Senegal with approximately thirty villages being involved. However, in many areas and regions there is resistance by older women to the loss of this power which traditionally conferred high social status upon them. Training older women in new health practices and integrating them into the education system would permit the preservation of the old social role but upon the basis of safer health practices. This would reduce the tension between the formal and informal knowledge systems inside which African girls currently reach maturity with benefits both to younger girls and older women.
Preserving knowledge of cultural tales and history is an obvious candidate for older persons' contributions to the classroom. Part of the HelpageGhana agenda for the schoolroom was indeed the transmission of culture in a context where it is subject to substantial displacement. The restricted availability of locally produced reading materials which reflect and incorporate local culture as compared with the greater availability of externally authored and produced materials represents a problem at every level of the African education system. The presence of older persons in the classroom willing to transmit these tales will not only help children's intellectual processing abilities but serve to retain key cultural values at the forefront of the experience of modern children. Once again new technologies can be useful in helping older persons and their organisations such as Helpage develop 'banks' of resources which can service the preserving of cultural knowledge.
Our intention here is not to produce a complete inventory of all the relevant skills or organisational benefits that older persons can bring to the Ghanaian classroom but rather to suggest that the time has come to undertake such an analysis and evaluation of what is possible and what precisely the benefits are.
There is clearly a need to think in terms of making more of the local relational resources available for educational provision; similarly there is a clear social need to think more precisely about making more effective use of older person's time. It is time to 'grow' local expertise rather than depend on imported concepts and models; it is time to 'grow' appropriate educational systems. For Africa now that growth should take an intergenerational form: in the near future, low cost information communication technology resources which both permit the localisation of educational content and provide access to the global domain are likely within Africa. With the advent of new information communication technologies, the arguments for depending so heavily on professionals in the classroom with the very low teacher: student ratio that imposes upon Africa are beginning to disappear. It is clearly time to think about how better to reintegrate older persons into the educational domain.
3. Education, new technology and a new perspective on lifelong learning.
Across the world, there has been an increasing recognition of the speed of technical change and the consequence of the increased rate of the speed of that change for educational organisation. Historically, changes in the professional and technical knowledge base were relatively slowly accomplished. In the present, the speed with which professional and technical knowledge changes and requires updating makes a functional pressure for the movement of global education systems away from an almost complete focus upon the very young towards work based learning and community based life long learning systems. Technological advancement will place the very models of education which Africa imitated themselves under change: indeed the biggest market in home information technology within the United States is to be found in the senior citizen sector. For the senior citizens of high income countries gaining knowledge of the new technologies becomes increasingly important to wellbeing and survival as more social and public services are placed upon 'intelligent' modes. As society ages, and for financial reasons, the requirement to place more social and public services upon intelligent modes increases: paradoxically the older person in the modern period may find themselves in more need of 'intelligent' knowledge than many other sections of society.
Although technical developments are highly unlikely to move at the same speed for most of Africa as for the high income countries, the issue of enabling the old to acquire the modern knowledge necessary for social survival is fundamentally no different. As models of life long learning take root and develop in the high income countries as a consequence of new technical and virtual developments, the opportunities to develop appropriate forms of these models in Africa will increase. Bringing older persons into the classroom to help resource better levels of child/ adult interactions and to transmit and preserve appropriate local social knowledge also enables older persons to be closer to new sources of technical and relevant external knowledge. Social proximity provides the conditions for the better understanding of the old by the young and vice versa but as importantly it places both generations within similar knowledge space for better managing their environment together.
There are, however, new information technology developments which do seem set to affect African development. The prospect of hand held low cost information communication technologies which will enable rural dwellers or service providers such as local health centres and schools in Africa to access global information resources is deemed possible within a half decade according to organisations such as Worldspace. Such technology would not only enable Africa to receive information from the outside but also enable Africa to readily transmit its own developmental messages globally and permit African agencies, NGOs and governments to better link in the development of appropriate social policy.
Integrating older persons into these new educational and health opportunities will be critical. Next year is the Year of the Older Person: developing policies, programmes and protocols which ensure that older persons, most particularly older women, receive appropriate representation in and service from the new technical developments must be a priority within this year of special attention. Life long learning and the development of the tools and resources to assist in its provision are key policy goals if older persons are not to be marginalised: within the frame of life long learning, it is important that old skills are also respected and preserved.
References
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Nana Apt,
Professor of Sociology and
Director of the Centre for Social Policy Studies,
University of Ghana, Legon
Professor of Organisation and Development Management,
The Business School,
University of North London
Re-evaluation and resourcing: appropriate educational forms for Africa.
Apt, N.A. (1995) Coping with old age in a changing Africa. Avebury: Aldershot.
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