Some Words about CONFINTEA


Contribution by AlanTuckett from UK NIACE - ICAE


It is hard, looking back, to remember just how optimistic we were at the time of CONFINTEA V. CONFINTEA came towards the end of a decade of United Nations conferences at which governments committed themselves to common strategies to address the need for sustainability, to transform the position of women, to tackle racism, to recognise the rights of indigenous peoples, and of course the right to learn. Through the decade civil society organizations had played an impressive role in helping to shape the agendas, and to frame the resolutions adopted, and in Hamburg, for the first time were given rights of attendance at the main conference. In Hamburg, too, the presence of a range of UN agencies was testimony to the growing recognition in international policy making that adult learning is a tool for the achievement of a range of social policy goals.


In Europe in the 1990s there was a parallel process, where governments and civil society organizations worked closely together through a series of European Presidency conferences to give reality to the assertion of Jacques Delors that lifelong learning was the key both to economic prosperity and to social cohesion. That process culminated in the Lisbon Declaration of 2000. The same dynamic in England had led to a fresh vision of the value of adult learning, articulated by David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, and to a breathtaking range of initiatives, again with non-government agencies as partners.


But some time around the millennium, things changed. Adult education was omitted from the millennium development goals; despite expanding its programme for adult education, Grundtvig, overall EU policy fell more and more into line with the OECD inspired human capital approach to investment in education for adults. In England this took a fairly severe form, as the exciting developments of the late 90s were rolled back. From 2003 public funding swung dramatically away from policies designed to maximise engagement with people on their own terms, towards funding qualifications bearing courses, organized by employers. The rationale for this was neo-liberal: that the UK faces intense global competition with the growing economic impact of the growth of the Chinese and Indian economies. The only future for a medium sized country like Britain was in the knowledge economy; the skills of the workforce were a key element in improving productivity and competitiveness; and there was, and is, a long tail of poorly qualified adults in England. This mattered because there is an emerging demographic crisis as the children born in the post-war baby boom neared retirement, and thee are not enough young people to replace them. Whilst industry has been hungry to import skilled migrants to fill the manpower shortages, governments remain sensitive to populist resistance to immigration. The strategy, then, was to accelerate the acquisition of qualifications and skills by existing workers. Of course, the experience of Scotland and Canada shows us that improving the stock of qualifications alone is not enough, without enterprises competent to make use of those skills, but in England, at least, that evidence was readily ignored during the years of the economic boom.


Things did not look much better at the mid-term review of CONFINTEA V in Bangkok. It was at this event that John Daniel, then Assistant Secretary for Education at UNESCO told adult educators that they are 'boring, backward looking, sentimental and parentalist'. At this time, too, the UNESCO Institute for Education was under threat. Whilst the EU had, on paper at least an inclusive and developmental agenda for adult learning for the citizens of its member states, its development funding was depressingly limited to support of the World Bank's fast track initiative, privileging universal primary education at the expense of adult literacy or the education of women and girls.


Not everything was bleak, though. The growth in global communications gave rise to new forms of association in civil society, most wonderfully expressed in the annual World Social Forums. Their assertion that 'another world is possible' has been a beacon of hope for adult educators, north and south, through some tough years.


And then came the crisis. Its immediate impact on education, of course, happens during each recession, and each period of economic restructuring. Large numbers of young people face extended periods of unemployment, and older workers who lose their jobs find themselves more or less permanently excluded from the labour market. There are short term responses to support learning which can keep people at work, notably in small and medium sized enterprises. But the imaginative Danish job rotation programmes, which have had the effect of re-attaching longer term unemployed people to the world of work have not been widely adopted.


There are, though, some encouraging signs that the neo-liberal paradigm of support for a high skills labour market, offering rich rewards, alongside a low wage low skills labour market for the poorest twenty or thirty percent is cracking. A number of studies by economists question whether the annual Gross Domestic Product was the best way of measuring the success of a country, particularly where GDP per capita is over $10,000 a year. Wilkinson and Pickett's book, The Spirit Level, showed that in countries with a larger gap between wealth and poverty, rich and poor alike thrive less well than in countries where inequalities are narrower. Growing incidence of mental health problems at work reminded people work and wider social well-being are intimately connected. And now we have the Sarkozy commission's report in France, where Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and a host of distinguished advisers point out that economic measures that only see the impact on profit and loss today, with no attention to the long term, will leave us with a world where resources are depleted, and where jam today is paid for by want tomorrow. That lesson is of course borne out exactly in the behaviour of the global bankers who brought on the present crisis.


This openness to re-balancing policy is of key importance to adult educators, and provides a chance to re-assert the Hamburg agenda, adding to it that the Wilkinson and Pickett analysis works globally, too. It is the major indictment of neo-liberalism that the economic riches of the north have too often been bought with the intensification of poverty in the south, and for that matter among the marginalised in the north, too. A less unequal world, where the freedom of movement and association, and the right to learn are assured for everybody, must be in all our interests. And our task as adult educators is to support the creation of that other, possible world.


Wilkinson, R and Pickett, K The Spirit Level, Penguin 2009
http://www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/documents/rapport_anglais