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POLICY, LAWS, FUNDS
Nature of PolicyDESIGNING AND DELIVERING ADULT EDUCATION WITHIN A FRAMEWORK OF PLANNED CHANGE Dr. H.S. Bhola - Indiana University Policy making is a state function. The essential purpose of policy making is to promote (or impose) in a society, new distributions of power with associated distributions of economic, social and cultural goods. A policy declaration by the state may follow an authorizing legislative action, and may be followed by laws and/or administrative rules. Policy-making is often accompanied by announcements of institutional arrangements, establishing new institutional mechanisms or reorganization of existing institutions). Policy making also includes allocation of state resources, or donor funding mediated by the state. The size and time-span of resource allocations is often a clear sign of the depth of commitment of the state to a particular policy enunciated. Today, policies as declared, are often placed within a particular framework of objectives, or placed within a particular context or a set of layered contexts. Policies are also being linked to paradigm shifts of ideology and technology. By No Means Neat and Clean Process Policy making is by no means a neat and clean process. Policy makers may deliberately obfuscate and mislead by using Orwellian double-speak in their policy enunciations. They may actively subvert the policies they themselves enunciated by starving policy of resources, or placing the task of implementing policy in the wrong bureaucratic location: for instance placing adult literacy within primary education, or worse still inside of department of social services, or of labor development. Related Policy Processes Policy making is only one of the typical policy processes, the other three being policy analysis, policy implementation, and policy evaluation. Policy making is not a science, it is politics based on the art of the possible. Policy analysis asks and answers the question: Is he policy principled, professionally sound, and practical? Policy implementation is about designing operational models and plans for delivering what was promised. Policy evaluation is about making qualitative and quantitative assertions about results actually achieved as part of policy implementation. In today’s world, the state often associates the civil society and the sector of higher education in these policy processes through consultations or outsourcing the tasks of analysis, project implementation, and evaluation. Policy making by the state is not completely immune to influences from outside and from below. There is another quite important opening available to those who are aware and ready. In the natural flow of social processes, as policy begins its descent from the top of the pyramid down the slope to the localities, it inevitably gets “re-constructed” and in the process is often re-appropriated, sometime even misappropriated. To re-appropriate a national policy is not a dishonest act. Indeed, that is what we often mean by re-inventing policies within the existing contexts and conditions of our work at the various levels. Within a Framework of Planned Change: Moving Toward Poverty Eradication for Sustain Development Adult educators must look at adult education (for self-directed independent adult learning) not merely as instructional but also instrumental: an instrument for planned change to create a society without poverty. Needed is an interventionist model that has a clear idea of the social and political configurations that must come together as implementers to achieve poverty eradication among a particular set of social constituencies and locations which as beneficiaries must experience the planned change in their lives. The resources required by planners to implement change, and by beneficiaries to incorporate change in their lives must be organized as well. The Overlapping Framework of Objectives: Curriculum Design, and Program Delivery The discourses on adult education today are invariably connected with the objectives of poverty eradication, ultimately leading to sustainable development. We should begin with writing a statement describing the policies of the state in regard to poverty eradication and sustainable development. At the same time, we should systemically and systematically do careful analyses of these two concepts of poverty and sustainable development and draw implications. Testing these two statements one against the other we should generate designs for program delivery and for curricular content that must be transmitted to the potential beneficiaries. These program and curricular plans must be validated and revised in participation with communities. Not Without Adult Literacy! While working with illiterate or semi-literate youth or adults male or female we must always, without fail begin with teaching literacy. We do not “just read”, we always “read something”. In other words, in teaching literacy skills, we will inevitably be engaged in adult education. The point to make is that literacy skills should get the attention which is its due. Education of Educators: Capacity Building for All Engaged All encounters with adults in families and communities should generate capacities among adults to be independent individuals and active citizens. But it is not just the poor who would need new personal capacities, adult also the educators themselves would need new capacities. At all the various levels of the pyramid of power in a society, there should be appropriately placed lobbying groups of adult educators who can make their voices heard by the power-holders at that particular levels. But lobbying would not be enough. Adult educators should also have new professional capacities: most importantly, the ability to design and deliver curricula that serve the needs of specific communities in particular contexts and condition.
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