Brief Historical Development of Adult Education

This article outlines some critical developments in the history of adult education from the early beginnings to the idea of lifelong learning for all. The notes present the history by region, starting with key concepts, early adult education in Britain, Sunday and adult schools, mechanics’ institutes, workers’ education, the Nordic folk high schools and study circles, Germany, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, women’s learning, and the international movement led by UNESCO. Each unit stands alone, so you can read them in any order. A timeline and a comparison table are presented near the end to help you see the whole picture.

 

KEY CONCEPTS AND TERMS

Adult education is organized learning for people who are no longer in the regular school system. It covers basic literacy, job skills, civic knowledge, cultural learning, and personal growth. Community education starts from what a community needs and uses what the community already has. Learners help decide what is taught. Lifelong education and lifelong learning describe learning that continues from childhood into old age. Lengrand (1975) was one of the first to argue that education should be understood as a process lasting a whole life and not only the school years, and the idea was taken up widely in the 1970s. The word "lifewide" is often added to show that learning also happens across many settings, which include home, work, church, and community.

 

Popular education and folk education are terms used mostly in the Nordic countries and Latin America. They mean learning that belongs to ordinary people, often organized through their own movements, such as churches, labor unions, and temperance societies. In Swedish the idea is called folkbildning. Freire (1970) gave popular education a sharper political edge. He argued that real education helps people read their world critically and act to change it, and he contrasted this with teaching that simply fills passive learners with facts.

 

Adult education has also been described through different traditions. The liberal tradition values learning for its own sake and for building a thoughtful citizen. The vocational tradition prepares people for work. The radical or emancipatory tradition links learning to social change. Most real programs mix all three. Workers’ education is the part of adult education organised for and often by working people, and it has frequently been shaped by the labour movement.

 

Learning is also grouped by setting. Formal learning is structured and leads to certificates. Non-formal learning is organized but sits outside the school system, like a literacy class or a farmers’ course. Informal learning happens in daily life, through family, work, and community. Literacy is another term that has many layers. Basic literacy means reading, writing, and counting. Functional literacy links these skills to the learner’s work and daily problems. Critical literacy, a Freirean idea, adds the ability to question and act. Finally, andragogy is the term Knowles (1980) popularized for the art and science of helping adults learn. In his view, adults want to be self-directed, bring valuable experience to the classroom, and learn best when the lesson speaks to real problems.

 

Lindeman (1926) had captured much of this decades earlier. He wrote that adult learning is built around life situations and not school subjects, and that the adult learner’s own experience is the most valuable resource in the room. Jarvis (2004) later placed adult education inside the wider idea of lifelong learning and discussed how the two relate in theory and practice. For African settings, Fasokun et al. (2005) show how these ideas need to be read alongside local realities, and Bown and Okedara (1981) edited a cross-cultural introduction written for developing countries.

 

Key points Adult education began before schools. The words used today (community education, popular education, and lifelong learning) each carry a slightly different emphasis: local needs, people’s movements, and learning across life. Always ask what a program was for and who controlled it.

 

LEARNING IN AFRICA BEFORE COLONIAL RULE

Long before schools were established, African societies educated their members at every age and stage of life. Learning was woven into daily life. Children and adults learned farming, herding, crafts, healing, law, history, and spiritual practice by taking part in the work and ceremonies of the community. Nyerere (1968) described this kind of traditional education as informal, practical, and closely tied to the values and needs of the society. It prepared people for the roles they would actually play.

 

Several features stand out here. Learning was communal, because elders, relatives, and neighbors all had a teaching role. The family structure itself was essential to the orientation of the next generation of adults. Education, teaching, and learning were preserved in oracy and sometimes etched in artifacts such as knobkerries, tools, and weapons, among other things. Yes, it was oral, because knowledge passed through proverbs, stories, songs, and praise poetry. It was also embedded in daily routines, family, work, and entertainment. It was practical, because people learned by doing, often through apprenticeship to a skilled person. And it was age and stage based, with initiation rites marking the move from childhood to adulthood. Specific institutions, such as the Shona dare and nhanga, are described in detail in this article.

 

Traditional education also had limits. It could be slow to take in new knowledge, and in many places it favored men and elders. It would be wrong to romanticize it but equally wrong to treat it as if it were not education at all. As shown later, colonial rule pushed this learning aside and replaced it with schooling that served a very different purpose. To have a clear understanding, histories of different regions and/or countries shall be described here. These descriptions can later be used for comparative analysis as well as drawing important lessons for contemporary adult education practice and development.

 

EARLY ADULT EDUCATION IN BRITAIN

Circulating schools and Sunday schools

The story of organized adult education in Britain starts with religion and literacy. In Wales, the clergyman Griffith Jones began his circulating schools in the early 1730s. A teacher would stay in one village for about three months, teach people to read the Bible in Welsh, and then move on. The schools were meant mainly for children, but adults also attended, in the evenings and on Sundays. Kelly (1992) records thousands of these schools and well over a hundred thousand learners by the time Jones died in 1761. Teaching in Welsh, the language people actually spoke, was an important reason for their success.

 

Sunday schools followed from the 1780s. Robert Raikes of Gloucester is the best-known founder, and Hannah More ran schools in the Mendip villages. Most pupils were children who worked during the week, but in Wales the early Sunday schools admitted adults as well, and they focused on reading the Scriptures. These schools show an early pattern that appears again and again elsewhere: religious groups were often the first to teach ordinary people to read.

 

Adult schools

The first school meant mainly for adults is usually dated to 1798 in Nottingham. A Methodist, William Singleton, and a Quaker (member of the Religious Society of Friends), Samuel Fox, started classes for young working women from the lace and hosiery factories. The idea spread. Methodists began an adult school movement in 1812, Quakers opened a Sunday school for adults in Bristol in 1810, and by 1818 there were over two hundred adult schools in England and Wales. Fieldhouse (1996) treats them as one strand of the longer story of modern British adult education.

 

Adult schools taught reading first, and often writing, with the Bible as the main text. Arithmetic was often left out because Sunday was a day of rest. Over time the schools added fellowship, savings clubs, temperance work, and wider education. They were run by volunteers, they charged little, and they treated the learners as adults who wanted to improve themselves. Their weakness was that they were small, depended on religious volunteers, and lacked steady funding. Even so, they were the first provision in Britain designed specifically for adults.

 

Key points Early British adult education grew from religious motives and the need for basic literacy. Teaching in the learner’s own language (Welsh circulating schools), low cost, and volunteer teachers were its strengths. Limited funding and a narrow curriculum were its weaknesses.

 

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTES

The Industrial Revolution created a large class of skilled workers, or mechanics, who needed technical knowledge. In Glasgow, the physician George Birkbeck had lectured to artisans around 1800, and in the early 1820s, mechanics’ institutes were formed in Glasgow and London. The London Mechanics’ Institution opened in 1823, and the model spread quickly across industrial towns. Kelly (1992) describes how hundreds of institutes appeared in the following decades.

 

A typical institute had a lecture hall, a library, a reading room, and sometimes classrooms. The program included lectures on science and engineering, and many institutes also taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. Supporters were a mix of liberal employers, reformers, and workers. The aim, in the words of the time, was to spread useful knowledge, and publishers such as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, formed in 1826, produced cheap books for the same purpose.

 

Over time the institutes ran into problems. Many working people lacked the basic schooling to follow the lectures. Fees put the classes out of reach for the poorest. Employers and patrons often wanted to avoid politics and religion, while some workers wanted exactly those subjects. As a result, in many places the membership shifted toward clerks, shopkeepers, and the lower middle class. Some institutes faded, some became public libraries or technical colleges, and the London institution grew into Birkbeck College. The lesson is that an institution built for workers by sponsors can drift away from them unless workers have real control. In a nutshell, the institute ran into this problem because it was top-down in approach and lacked the full participation and involvement of the targeted groups in the planning and implementation processes.

 

UNIVERSITY EXTENSION, SETTLEMENTS AND WORKERS’ EDUCATION

University extension programmes

By the 1870s the universities of England began to reach beyond their walls. Cambridge started extension lectures in 1873, and London and Oxford followed soon after. Lecturers travelled to towns to give courses, set essays and hold examinations. Many students were women and middle-class adults, since working men often could not afford the fees or the time. Even so, extension lectures opened the idea that a university had a duty to the wider public.

Settlements

The settlement movement placed educated volunteers in poor urban areas to live, learn and teach alongside their neighbours. Toynbee Hall in East London, opened in 1884 by Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, is the most famous. Settlements offered classes, lectures and clubs, and they became places where university teachers met working people.

 

Ruskin College and the labour movement

Ruskin College in Oxford opened in 1899, founded by two Americans, Walter Vrooman and Charles Beard, to give working men a chance to study close to the university. Its early years were marked by a dispute that is central to the history of workers’ education. Some in the labour movement believed that education should serve working-class interests openly and be independent of the university and the state. In 1909 students and teachers who held this view left Ruskin and set up the Central Labour College, and the Plebs’ League supported this independent approach.

 

The Workers’ Educational Association (WEA)

The WEA was founded in 1903 by Albert Mansbridge, a clerk and co-operative movement member, and began as an association to promote the higher education of working people. Its main idea was a partnership. Working-class organisations such as trade unions and co-operative societies would join with university teachers to create classes. Tutorial classes met for several years, with a small group of students working with a university tutor, doing written work and shaping the syllabus together. The first famous class, in Rochdale in 1907, was taught by R. H. Tawney.

 

The WEA’s approach was liberal. It valued honest, impartial study over propaganda, and it believed working people could handle serious subjects such as economics and history. Critics on the left disagreed and thought that impartial teaching could never serve the working class. Debates of this kind between independent working-class education and partnership with universities still continue in discussions of adult education (Kelly, 1992).

 

Key points Workers’ education in Britain grew from three sources: reformers who wanted workers to share useful knowledge (mechanics’ institutes), universities reaching out (extension and the WEA) and the labour movement’s demand for education it could control (Ruskin and the Central Labour College). The tension between partnership and independence is a core theme.

 

BRITISH ADULT EDUCATION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The First World War changed attitudes. In 1919, the Adult Education Committee of the Ministry of Reconstruction published its final report. It argued that adult education was a permanent national need, a part of citizenship, and something that should be available to all and for the whole of life. Many historians treat it as a starting point for modern policy thinking, a view that appears in Fieldhouse (1996). The Education Act of 1944 placed a duty on local authorities to provide further education, and local authority evening classes grew in the post-war decades. In 1973 the Russell Report set out a plan for development of adult education in England and Wales. Other large developments were the growth of university extramural departments, the arrival of residential colleges, and, most importantly, distance learning.

 

The Open University received its royal charter in 1969 and enrolled its first students in 1971. It offered degrees to adults without traditional entry qualifications, used printed units, radio and television programmes, and local tutors, and it showed that distance education could be taken seriously. For countries with scattered populations, such as Zimbabwe and Tanzania, its example has been influential. In recent decades British policy has increasingly framed adult learning in terms of skills, employability and lifelong learning, sometimes at the expense of the liberal and community-based traditions.

 

ADULT EDUCATION IN SCANDINAVIA

Denmark, Norway and Sweden share a tradition of popular adult education that is among the most admired in the world. Its core ideas are that learning should be voluntary, rooted in popular movements, open to ordinary people and linked to democracy.

 

Denmark and Grundtvig

The central figure is Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783–1872), a Danish pastor, poet and thinker. Grundtvig was critical of the schools of his day, which relied on memorising Latin and passing examinations. He wanted a “school for life,” where young adults would learn about their own history, language and culture through the spoken word, song and conversation. The aim was to awaken people and prepare them to take part in public life, especially farmers who were gaining political rights after Denmark’s first democratic constitution in 1849.

 

The first folk high school opened in Rødding in 1844, in the part of Schleswig then under Danish rule, inspired by Grundtvig’s ideas. The model that really spread, however, came from Christen Kold, who opened a school at Ryslinge in 1851. Kold kept things simple and cheap. Students lived at the school for a few months, usually after finishing work in the season, and learned through storytelling, talks and shared daily life. There were no entrance requirements and no examinations. Folk high schools grew rapidly after Denmark’s defeat in the war of 1864, which many Danes treated as a call for inner national renewal, and by 1918 Denmark had 68 of these schools. Links with agricultural co-operatives meant that learning often led directly to economic and community action.

 

Norway

Norway’s first folk high school opened in 1864 at Hamar, and the movement grew in the countryside during the late nineteenth century. Norwegian folk high schools were closely tied to national awakening, the revival of the Norwegian language and rural culture, and the growth of democracy through the nineteenth century, after Norway’s break from Denmark in 1814 and during its union with Sweden. Norway developed study circles and workers’ education alongside folk high schools, with voluntary organisations and the state both playing a role in funding.

 

Sweden and the study circle

Sweden’s first folk high schools opened in 1868, and the movement drew on the free churches, the temperance movement and the labour movement. Sweden’s most original contribution came in 1902. Oscar Olsson, a teacher and member of the Good Templar temperance order in Lund, formed what he called a study circle. Larsson and Nordvall (2010) describe Olsson as the father of the study circle. A small group of members, often meeting at home, would choose a topic, borrow books and study together under a leader chosen from among themselves. The circle depended on discussion and not on a professional teacher.

 

The idea fitted Sweden’s popular movements perfectly. Study circles needed little money, taught people to read critically and speak in meetings, and gave workers and small farmers the confidence to take part in politics. Parliament supported the movement with grants for books on condition that the libraries were open to the public, and national study associations grew up within the labour movement, the churches and other organisations. Municipal adult education, Komvux, followed in 1968 to give adults a second chance at formal qualifications.

 

Key points The Scandinavian model rests on voluntary learning, popular movements, state support without heavy control, and the link between learning and democracy. Folk high schools are residential and discussion-based. Study circles are small, self-managed groups. Both reached ordinary rural and working people.

 

ADULT EDUCATION IN FINLAND AND ICELAND

Finland

Finland shares the Nordic tradition but has its own history. Under Russian rule and with a strong national awakening, the Fennoman movement wanted to educate the Finnish-speaking majority and build a national culture. A key concept is sivistys, a word similar to the German Bildung, meaning education in the broad sense of cultivation, character and culture. The first folk high school opened in 1889 at Kangasala, and by 1917 there were 43 folk high schools, mostly in the countryside (Kansalaisyhteiskunta.fi, n.d.).

 

The workers’ institutes grew out of the labour movement. The first workers’ association was formed in Helsinki in 1884, and the first adult education centre, the Tampere Workers’ Institute, opened in 1899. By 1917 there were eleven such centres in the larger towns (Kansalaisyhteiskunta.fi, n.d.). Over time the institutes opened to the whole population and became the kansalaisopisto, the civic or adult education centre. The Workers’ Academy, a folk high school run by the labour movement, followed in 1924. Today Finland’s liberal adult education includes adult education centres, folk high schools, study centres, summer universities and sports institutes, and participation in adult learning is high (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2023a).

 

Iceland

Iceland has fewer written sources in English, so students should read cautiously and check dates. A small, scattered rural population meant that learning has long relied on the home, reading societies, youth and voluntary associations and short-term schools. By many accounts, near-universal reading ability in rural Iceland grew out of home teaching supervised by the church, an early example of learning without formal schools.

 

The modern system is more recent. Nine education and lifelong learning centres opened across the country in 1998 to 2000, and a framework law, the Adult Education Act (Act 27/2010), followed in 2010. The state supports second-chance education for adults who did not finish upper secondary school, and the centres offer courses, guidance and the validation of real competences. A body owned by the social partners, the Education and Training Service Centre, coordinates much of the work (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2023b). Iceland’s story shows how a small country can build a lifelong learning system through partnership between the state, employers and unions.

 

ADULT EDUCATION IN GERMANY

German adult education has deep roots in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, reading societies and the workers’ education associations of the nineteenth century. The modern Volkshochschule, or folk high school, took shape after the First World War. The name echoes the Danish idea, but the German institutions differ: most are non-residential, offer evening courses in towns, and are run by local authorities.

 

The Weimar Republic

The Weimar Constitution of 11 August 1919 contained a clause, Article 148, which told the state at all levels to promote popular education, including the Volkshochschulen. In effect adult education received constitutional status for the first time. More Volkshochschulen were founded in 1919 than in any other year in German history. The aim was to help people become informed and active citizens in the new democracy. The first course at the Gelsenkirchen Volkshochschule, for example, began in November 1919, supported by the social democratic trade unions (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, n.d.).

 

The Nazi period

After 1933 the Nazi regime brought adult education into line with its aims. Some Volkshochschulen were closed, some dissolved themselves in protest, and others were turned into tools for propaganda and ideological training. Educators who resisted, such as Adolf Reichwein, were dismissed. The period is an important warning that adult education can serve democracy or dictatorship, depending on who controls or funds it.

 

Post-war reconstruction

After 1945 the Volkshochschulen reopened in the western zones, often in 1946, and the Allied military governments supported political education as part of re-education. An American statement from 1947 spoke of teaching democratic principles and showing the errors of Nazi doctrine (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, n.d.). A national association, the Deutscher Volkshochschul-Verband, was formed in 1953. In East Germany, adult education was integrated into the school system and offered a second route to school certificates under a fixed curriculum.

 

From the 1960s and 1970s, continuing education expanded. The German Education Council in 1970 described continuing education as a fourth main sector of the education system, and several states passed laws on paid educational leave. Today about 900 Volkshochschulen offer courses in languages, health, civic education, second-chance qualifications and integration for migrants.

 

The dual system and vocational training

Germany’s other great contribution is vocational education. In the dual system, young people spend part of the week in a company, learning on the job under a recognised trainer, and the rest in a part-time vocational school. The Vocational Training Act of 1969 set a national legal framework, with employers, unions, chambers of commerce and the state sharing responsibility. Continuing vocational education then let skilled workers take further qualifications, such as the master craftsperson certificate. The system linked learning to the labour market, and has been a model for many countries, though it depended on strong employers and social partners.

 

ADULT EDUCATION IN TANZANIA

Background

Tanzania inherited a small colonial school system and very high adult illiteracy. More than seventy per cent of adults could not read or write at independence in 1961. Julius Nyerere, the first president and a former teacher, believed that adult education should come first, because adults make the decisions that shape the country in the present. He argued that adult education has no beginning or end and should be thought of as lifelong (Nyerere, 1979).

 

Ideas: Ujamaa and self-reliance

The Arusha Declaration of 1967 set out Tanzania’s path of socialism and self-reliance, called Ujamaa. In the same year Nyerere published Education for Self-Reliance, a critique of the colonial inheritance in which education had produced a small elite trained to serve the colonial state. He proposed that schools should be part of the community, linked to farming and productive work, and should prepare people to build the country (Nyerere, 1968). Adult education was part of the same vision. Learning was to help people understand their situation, take decisions together and improve their lives through their own effort. Hall (1975) and Kassam (1978) wrote early accounts of this link between adult education and development.

 

Institutions and campaigns

Several institutions came first. Kivukoni College, opened in 1961, trained political and party cadres. The Institute of Adult Education was formed in the early 1960s to provide courses, correspondence study and research. A functional literacy pilot began at Mwanza in 1968 with UNESCO’s help. In his New Year addresses to the nation of 1969 and 1970, Nyerere stressed that education never ends, and 1970 was declared Adult Education Year.

 

A national literacy campaign followed from 1971 in several phases, reaching millions of learners with support from Swedish and UN agencies. Primary schools served as adult classes in the afternoon, and classes also met in factories, party offices and market places. Radio study groups carried the message widely. The campaign was linked to national themes. The 1973 Man is Health campaign taught hygiene and health habits through radio and study groups, and Food is Life in 1975 focused on agriculture (Mushi & Bwatwa, 1998).

 

Another innovation was the Folk Development College (FDC). Mushi (1991) names these colleges, together with functional literacy and workers’ education, as the three major innovations of the period. FDCs, set up from the mid-1970s, were rural colleges offering short courses in farming, home economics, carpentry, handicrafts and mechanics, mostly for villagers. The name and idea recall the Nordic folk high schools, and Nordic donors supported them. A post-literacy curriculum was designed in the late 1970s to keep new literates reading.

 

Results and criticisms

The results were striking. Official reports spoke of adult illiteracy falling from around 70% at independence to less than 10% by the mid-1980s (Mushi & Bwatwa, 1998). The campaigns also brought health and agricultural messages to many villages, and they gave adult education a high place in national policy. Tanzania became a model for other African countries and was widely studied (Hinzen & Hundsdorfer, 1979).

 

Later writers have raised several concerns. Campaigns driven from the centre by mass mobilisation risk treating learners as targets and not as partners, and this sat uneasily with Nyerere’s own belief that adult learners are volunteers. Dependence on foreign funding and on mobilisation by political structures made progress hard to sustain once enthusiasm and money faded. Economic crisis in the 1980s and the cut-backs that followed weakened the system, and without enough reading materials and follow-up programmes, new literacy skills can fade. These are the lessons that make Tanzania’s case so useful for comparison.

 

Key points Tanzania linked adult education to a national philosophy (Ujamaa and self-reliance), used mass campaigns, radio and rural colleges, and showed how fast literacy can grow when politics, resources and learners’ motivation align. Its weaknesses were centralisation, dependence on external funds and a lack of long-term follow-up.

 

ZIMBABWE BEFORE INDEPENDENCE

Pre-colonial learning

In Shona communities, as in other Zimbabwean societies, learning was part of social life. The dare was the meeting place where elders discussed disputes, governance and customs, and where younger men learned by listening and taking part. The nhanga was the space where girls and young women learned from grandmothers and aunts about family life, community responsibilities and moral values. Other channels included apprenticeship to a skilled person in farming, iron-working, pottery, weaving or healing, initiation that marked the move into adulthood, and oral tradition, with proverbs, stories, songs and praise poetry carrying history and values. Spiritual practice and learning about the land were also woven into community life. These forms were participatory and tied to real needs, though they often favoured elders and men.

 

Colonial education

From the 1890s, white settler rule brought a new school system. The first education law, passed in the early colonial period, set up separate schools for different races, gave much more attention to European education, and left the provision of African schools mainly in the hands of Christian missionaries. Hungwe (1994) shows that colonial education policy was shaped chiefly by settler concerns for white security and culture. Government grants supported mission schools, and missions used schools to attract converts. At the same time the settler state treated African education as a way of producing useful, disciplined workers and tried to limit academic education that might lead Africans to demand equality.

 

Yet Africans were not passive. From the early twentieth century they asked for schools, petitioned missions and the government, and saw education as a route to better jobs and a place in society. The debate about girls’ education, studied by Summers (1996), shows how settlers, officials and missionaries argued about what women should learn. Many of them wanted to train women for domestic roles and keep them in rural households that supported the migrant labour system. At the same time, church women’s groups such as Ruwadzano, associated with the Methodist church, gave women a space to learn and organise.

 

Adult education in the colonial period

Adults learned through several channels. Mission stations ran classes for converts, and evening and night classes grew in towns and mining areas as workers sought literacy and basic qualifications. Church groups and organisations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) offered classes, and correspondence colleges allowed many people who had left school to continue studying on their own. These routes were often the only way for Africans to gain qualifications.

 

Organised literacy work began in the late 1950s, when a group of concerned women, among them Stella Greenway and Margaret Carmody, sought methods for teaching adult non-readers. In 1960 they made contact with followers of Frank Laubach’s Each One Teach One method, and the Adult Literacy Organisation was formed. From 1963, with Alice Sanderson’s leadership, it trained volunteer tutors; by 1965 she had trained 715 volunteers, and the work reached mining and subsistence farming communities with courses that included family and farm budgeting (Sigauke, 2001). During the war of liberation in the 1970s the organisation continued rural programmes and also worked in the protected villages, with literacy, homecraft and farming lessons.

 

Learning in the liberation struggle

The liberation movements also treated learning as part of the struggle. Camps outside the country, in countries such as Zambia, Mozambique and Tanzania, ran schools and classes for recruits and refugees, taught literacy and political education, and trained people in skills needed for a future state. Learning was linked to the aim of freedom, which is why many scholars treat this period as a clear case of education for liberation as opposed to education for control.

 

Key points Colonial Zimbabwe had two kinds of adult education. One was the settler and mission system, which was racially divided and designed to produce useful workers. The other was the learning that Africans demanded and organised for themselves: night classes, correspondence study, women’s church groups, volunteer literacy work and, in the liberation struggle, political and basic education.

 

ZIMBABWE AFTER INDEPENDENCE

Independence in 1980 brought a huge expansion of education. After ninety years of colonial rule and years of war, the new government faced a population with large numbers of adults who had never been to school. Grainger (1987) notes that the disruption of war and displacement made a wide national campaign necessary and not only small projects.

 

Teachers, schools and non-formal education

To staff the new schools, the government launched the Zimbabwe Integrated National Teacher Education Course (ZINTEC) in 1980, an accelerated programme that combined college and in-school training. Non-formal education was given a place in national policy, with adult literacy and basic education programmes, including Zimbabwe Adult Basic Education Course (ZABEC), run in cooperation with ministries, churches and NGOs. Vocational Training Centres, polytechnics and apprenticeship schemes expanded technical skills training. Women’s clubs and income-generating projects and cooperatives, such as gardening, sewing and poultry, linked learning to livelihoods.

 

The National Literacy Campaign

The government launched a national literacy campaign in 1983 aiming to remove illiteracy within five years. Responsibility was shared between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Community Development and Women’s Affairs, with district committees recruiting and training volunteer literacy tutors and setting up classes (Grainger, 1987). The 1982 census found that about 37% of adults were non-literate, and by the 1992 census the figure had dropped to about 20% (Sigauke, 2001). Much of this fall must be linked to the rapid growth of schooling, as younger and more literate cohorts replaced older ones, and not to the campaign alone.

 

The campaign faced serious problems. Participation fell over time; Sigauke (2001) shows adult literacy enrolments dropping between 1985 and 1994. Funding came largely from external sources such as UNESCO and UNICEF, and national spending on adult literacy did not match spending on formal schooling. Droughts in 1983–84 and 1992–93 drew funds away. Non-literacy remained highest in rural areas and among women, and learners often dropped out because of work, family duties, shame or a lack of practical benefit. Sigauke’s study of the Adult Literacy Organisation of Zimbabwe found that learners were more likely to attend when literacy was linked to projects that meant income, such as gardens, carpentry and sewing, and that unpaid volunteer tutors were becoming harder to find.

 

Later developments

Economic difficulties from the 1990s onwards, including structural adjustment and later crisis, put pressure on all public education. Non-formal education relied heavily on NGOs, churches and community organisations. In higher education, the Education 5.0 policy introduced from 2018 asks universities to link teaching, research and community service with innovation and industrialisation, which opens a new link between higher education and community development. Throughout this history, the questions remain the same: who provides, who pays, who is left out, and whether the programme builds real capability.

 

Key points After 1980 Zimbabwe expanded schools, teacher training, non-formal education and vocational training, and launched a mass literacy campaign in 1983. Literacy rose quickly, but adult programmes struggled with funding, volunteer tutors, drop-out and the continued exclusion of rural women. Linking literacy to livelihoods worked best.

 

WOMEN AND ADULT EDUCATION

Women have always been learners and teachers, but their access to formal adult education has been unequal. The history shows several patterns. First, women organised their own learning. In traditional Zimbabwean society the nhanga passed knowledge between generations of women. Under colonial rule, church women’s groups such as Ruwadzano and later homecraft and women’s clubs offered training in household skills, health, and sewing, though missionaries and officials often intended to channel women toward domestic roles (Summers, 1996). The Women’s Institute movement began in Canada in 1897 and reached Britain in 1915, bringing rural women together for practical learning, and it spread widely in the Commonwealth. In the Nordic countries, women’s associations were among the social movements from which popular adult education grew.

 

Second, literacy gaps have fallen heavily on women. In Zimbabwe, Sigauke (2001) reports that between 1970 and 1985 the number of non-literate women rose slightly while the number of non-literate men fell, and that non-literacy in the early 1990s was highest among rural women. Women carry the greatest burden of rural development, which makes the gap more serious. Women’s participation also depends on practical matters: time, childcare, distance, family permission and fear of embarrassment.

 

Third, programmes work better when learning is linked to women’s own priorities. Income-generating projects, health learning and cooperatives have helped women see the point of literacy. Freire (1970) is relevant here too, because he argued that learning is empowering when people use it to name and change the conditions of their lives. In international policy, the Hamburg Declaration of 1997 and later UNESCO frameworks gave particular attention to women’s access to adult learning, and gender equality is built into Sustainable Development Goal 4 and Goal 5 (United Nations, 2015).

 

THE INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENT AND LIFELONG LEARNING FOR ALL

 

UNESCO and the world conferences

UNESCO was created in 1945 and has been the main international voice for adult education. Its major conferences on adult education, called CONFINTEA translated from French to mean International Conference on Adult Education, are held roughly every twelve years. The first met in Elsinore, Denmark, in 1949, a deliberate choice of a country with a strong folk high school tradition. The others were Montreal (1960), Tokyo (1972), Paris (1985), Hamburg (1997), Belém (2009) and Marrakech (2022). Each reflects the thinking of its time, from post-war reconstruction to development, human rights and the digital age (Akther, 2020).

 

Literacy campaigns

From the 1960s UNESCO promoted functional literacy, linking reading and writing to farming, health and work. The Experimental World Literacy Programme, from 1967, tested this approach in several countries, and Tanzania’s functional literacy work was part of this wave. Bhola (1994) gathered perspectives from the grassroots on literacy work and argued for attention to what happens in local communities.

 

From adult education to lifelong learning

In 1972 the Faure report, Learning to Be, argued that education should continue throughout life and that societies should become learning societies (Faure et al., 1972). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) proposed recurrent education in 1973, with alternating periods of work and study. The Delors report of 1996, Learning: The Treasure Within, named four pillars of learning: to know, to do, to live together and to be (Delors et al., 1996). The Hamburg Declaration of 1997 called adult learning a key to the twenty-first century.

 

These reports have been praised and criticised. Elfert (2015) examines the Faure and Delors reports and describes the vision of lifelong learning in them as a kind of political utopia, arguing that the humanist ideals were gradually replaced in practice by an economic emphasis on skills and employability. This is a valuable point for students: lifelong learning can mean personal and social development, or it can mean constant upskilling for the labour market.

 

Education for All and the Sustainable Development Goals

The World Conference on Education for All at Jomtien, Thailand in 1990 and the Dakar, Senegal Framework of 2000 set targets for basic education and adult literacy. In 2015 the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda, and Sustainable Development Goal 4 calls for inclusive and equitable quality education and the promotion of lifelong learning opportunities for all (United Nations, 2015). UNESCO’s recommendation on adult learning and education followed in 2015, and the Marrakech Framework for Action of 2022 in Morocco called for adult learning to be strengthened and funded (UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, 2022). The phrase “lifelong learning for all” now guides policy, though in many countries adult education is still the most underfunded part of the education system.

 

JUXTAPOSED

Table 1. Comparison of the regions

Region	Starting point	Main providers	Main purposes	Main strength or lesson
Britain	Church literacy, then industry	Churches, reformers, universities, unions, later the state	Literacy, useful knowledge, workers’ education, citizenship	Partnership with universities; distance learning (Open University)
Scandinavia	Farmers and rural awakening, popular movements	Folk high schools, study associations, voluntary groups, state grants	Democracy, culture, citizenship	Voluntary, learner-led and well funded without heavy control
Finland and Iceland	National awakening; labour movement; scattered rural population	Folk high schools, workers’ institutes, later the state and social partners	Culture, equality, second chance	Municipal adult education centres; partnership with employers and unions
Germany	Enlightenment and workers’ associations; Weimar democracy	Local authorities, Volkshochschulen, employers, chambers	Citizenship, vocational skills, re-education	Legal status for adult education; dual system
Tanzania	Mass illiteracy at independence	State, party, UNESCO and Nordic donors	Self-reliance, literacy, development	Link to national philosophy; rural colleges; caution on centralisation
Zimbabwe	Traditional learning; colonial missions; liberation struggle	Communities, missions, state, NGOs, women’s groups	Livelihood, literacy, liberation, development	Link literacy to livelihoods; secure funding and volunteer support

 

Five questions help you compare any case.

a.     Was the programme meant to liberate or to control?

b.     Who led it: the state, the church, NGOs or the people themselves?

c.     Who was included, and who was left out?

d.     What role did language, culture and politics play?

e.     How long did it last once outside money and enthusiasm faded?

A Master Timeline

 

Table 2. Key milestones in the history of adult education

Year	Event
Pre-colonial	Learning through dare, nhanga, apprenticeship, initiation and oral tradition in Zimbabwe and other African societies.
1730s	Griffith Jones begins Welsh circulating schools.
1780s	Sunday school movement begins in England and Wales.
1798	First adult school in Nottingham (Singleton and Fox).
1823	London and Glasgow mechanics’ institutes formed.
1844	First folk high school at Rødding, Denmark.
1851	Christen Kold opens a folk high school at Ryslinge.
1864	First folk high school in Norway, at Hamar.
1868	First folk high schools in Sweden.
1873	Cambridge begins university extension lectures.
1884	Toynbee Hall opens in East London.
1889	First folk high school in Finland, at Kangasala.
1899	Ruskin College opens; Tampere Workers’ Institute opens in Finland.
1902	First study circle in Sweden (Oscar Olsson).
1903	Workers’ Educational Association founded in England.
1915	Women’s Institutes begin in Britain.
1919	Weimar Constitution Article 148 promotes Volkshochschulen; British Adult Education Committee report.
1933	Nazi regime closes or controls German Volkshochschulen.
1949	First UNESCO adult education conference (CONFINTEA I), Elsinore.
1953	German Volkshochschul-Verband formed.
Late 1950s to 1960s	Adult Literacy Organisation begins in Rhodesia.
1961	Tanzania independence; Kivukoni College opens.
1967	Arusha Declaration and Education for Self-Reliance in Tanzania.
1969 to 1971	Open University chartered (1969) and first students admitted (1971).
1970	Adult Education Year in Tanzania; national literacy campaign follows from 1971.
1972	Faure report, Learning to Be.
Mid-1970s	Folk Development Colleges established in Tanzania.
1980	Zimbabwe independence; ZINTEC launched.
1983	Zimbabwe National Literacy Campaign launched.
1990	World Conference on Education for All, Jomtien.
1996 and 1997	Delors report (1996); CONFINTEA V and Hamburg Declaration (1997).
2010	Iceland’s Adult Education Act.
2015	Sustainable Development Goals, including SDG 4.
2022	CONFINTEA VII and the Marrakech Framework for Action.

 

Review Questions

1.     Explain the difference between adult education, community education and lifelong learning.

2.     Why were religious groups so important in early adult education in Britain? Give two examples.

3.     Describe how mechanics’ institutes began, what they offered and why they drifted away from workers.

4.     Compare the Workers’ Educational Association with the Central Labour College. What was the disagreement about?

5.     What were Grundtvig’s main ideas, and how did Christen Kold turn them into a working school?

6.     How does a Swedish study circle work, and why did it suit popular movements?

7.     Show how adult education in Germany served democracy in one period and dictatorship in another.

8.     Summarise Tanzania’s adult education strategy of the 1970s and give two strengths and two weaknesses.

9.     Trace adult education in Zimbabwe through the pre-colonial, colonial, liberation and post-independence periods.

10.  Why have women often had less access to literacy, and what has helped to change this?

11.  What does Elfert (2015) argue about UNESCO’s vision of lifelong learning?

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