DIGITALISERING - INKLUDERING- GRØNN TENKING - GYLDIGHET
INCLUSION
If we understand inclusion in its broadest sense, no education is more inclusive than adult education. What is lacking in infrastructure and general conditions for teaching and learning, it makes up for in empathy, resilience, flexibility, companionship and solidarity. Challenges that are difficult to achieve in the formal education system occur almost naturally in adult education: collaborative learning, inter-generational learning, family education, community education. Age continues to be the factor of greatest discrimination in education, despite the rhetoric of Lifelong Learning; education, the right to education and even learning are still strongly associated with childhood. Adult education centres break this logic although they cannot overcome prejudice on their own. From teenagers aged 15 - or younger - to people over 90 years old can share the same space and learn together, often defying the very policies that restrict the age of learners. The rigidity of the age-organised classroom, typical of formal education, is released in adult education. Literacy centres around the world are characterised by a high presence of women. Women who see literacy not only as an opportunity to learn but also to socialise, to meet other women, to escape for a few hours from the oppressive slavery of domestic tasks.
Adult education spaces are generally intercultural learning spaces where people from different places, ethnicities and cultures come together. Often they are not only multicultural environments but also multilingual.
Adult education welcomes people with all kinds of disabilities. The 'solutions' I have seen deployed in many centres have shown me the best of human beings and the blurred boundaries between the possible and the impossible.
Teenagers and pregnant women, often frowned upon and even rejected in formal classrooms, are welcomed in adult classrooms. The repeater can find here a place to try again, without fear. I have seen LGBTI people fully integrated into the group and foreigners feeling at home. Even religious, ideological and political differences can go unnoticed or be actively tolerated in these centres.
Adult education centres are living laboratories for solving economic, social and cultural problems, in conditions of material precariousness and great human and creative wealth. It is unfair that adult education, which contributes and teaches so much, continues to be so misunderstood, discriminated against and undervalued in our societies.
ADULT EDUCATION AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION
Perhaps the most important goal we pursue in adult education is to overcome the social exclusion that hinders the development of egalitarian and democratic societies in so many countries. In a series of articles describing experiences from four continents, we demonstrate that adult education is striving to achieve this goal. Adult education breaks down the barriers that keep people crowded into scheduled castes. Adult education is concerned with the specific exclusion that limits the opportunities of people with disabilities. Adult education provides the enabling factors without which people cannot enjoy education and vocational training. Adult education transforms cultural differences into intercultural assets. Participatory approaches in adult education encourage people to analyse their life situation and make their own decisions about how to improve it. Appropriate modalities and content for delivering adult education enable pastoralist communities to access learning opportunities that respect their values and life patterns. Adult education provides young prisoners with sufficient self-esteem and social values to enable them to take charge of their lives after their period of detention is over. Adult education combines basic education with productive work and creates viable alternatives for excluded women. Whatever the way in which social exclusion limits people's opportunities to share, grow and prosper, adult education will always offer a response that will enable these effects to be countered and obstacles overcome.
