The North-South Divide
The 1980s have seen the vast gap between the developed industrial world of the north and the developing world of the south widening rather than narrowing. This gap—nay, gulf—can be measured in many different ways, such as the infant mortality rate, population growth, nutrition, per-capita income, degree of industrialization, and debt:service ratio. But most of all it can be measured by the educational and technological gap between north and south. One simple indicator dramatizes this gap: the per-capita income in low-income economies is about one-thirtieth that of high-income economies, i.e., US$401 and US$12,454 respectively in 1988 (World Development Report, 1989. (146).
In the area of knowledge and technology, it is also possible to make comparisons in: the literacy rates; the percentage of the population that has completed primary, secondary, and tertiary education; the relative biases between the humanities and sciences; processes; or the level of managerial skills.
As education policies and strategies necessarily begin with an analysis of the existing situation, with its problems and potential vis-á-vis the aims and objectives of that society, it is essential that our discussion of strategies for distance education development begin with an analysis of the realities we face.
In developed, highly industrialized countries distance education plays an important role in bridging enforced distances. For example, the distance primary education system in Australia allows young children to remain with their parents on widely scattered farms and still enjoy the same quality of education as their urban counterparts. The use of radio, television, video and computers complements the printed word. In this case, distance education provides a facility that may indeed be equivalent in cost to formal education. In some cases, distance education may even be more expensive. Cost is not the main criteria for choosing distance education; convenience is more important.
Distance education provides opportunities for adults to change careers later in life; to enhance their skills and qualifications while retaining their jobs; to bring up a young family while continuing with their education; to keep up with ever-changing technologies; to improve their social position and status; and so on. These realities make distance education an important contributor to individual and personal satisfaction and to social mobility in industrialized countries. Distance education may serve the same or similar roles in developing countries, but very often the Third World is engaged in much more bread-and-butter issues, indeed in the battle for survival itself. Not surprisingly, distance education becomes not merely a tool for self-enhancement and self-fulfillment but a tool for survival.
Issues such as primary health care; child care and nutrition; family planning; improved methods of agriculture, animal husbandry and re-forestation; the use of banking facilities; the manipulation of existing extension services; and the use of appropriate technologies become key issues for development. Distance education is particularly appropriate for the dissemination and practice of these new knowledge areas and skills. Moreover, distance education, through the use of print and radio, can offer a lower-cost form of education in countries where the financing of large-scale education programs is often seriously problematic.
Development necessarily takes place within a political system, in a framework of accepted values and aspirations. Many industrialized countries have had the opportunity to develop this political consensus over several hundred years: Britain since the introduction of parliamentary democracy in 1688; France since the Bonaparte period, and the United States since the War of Independence. The communist world dates back to the 1917 Revolution. The third world countries have all had less than three decades of independence. Zimbabwe is one of the youngest, having been independent for a mere 10 years!
Despite their relative youth, these nations have to face the daunting problems of development on a foundation of meagre resources. They have to build up a consensus of values that are suitable to their milieux, caught up as they are between the tantalizing consumerist materialism of the West and the attractions of the Spartan egalitarianism of the East. This consensus is not possible without wide-scale education and modernization. Otherwise, third world societies are caught up not only in the strait-jacket of poverty but also in the fundamentalist philosophies of feudalism.
Thus, the challenge of education and development in the 1990s must be seen not only as more scientific and technological education but also development within a philosophical framework of values, aims and objectives. The conceptual complexities must reflect the complexities of reality, and in so doing offer real solutions to everyday problems. All too often overly simplistic answers have been offered to the Third World, among them family planning; stringent economic adjustment programs; devaluation; this or that ideology. These magic answers have all too often failed, not necessarily because they are incorrect in themselves but because they must fit into a subtle and complex context that may not be amenable to such oversimplistic interventions and controls. Family planning, for example, can make little sense to a peasant farmer operating in an economy in which he daily faces a severe shortage of labor. The key may lie not in indoctrination about the need for family planning but in the development of labor-
saving devices that will obviate the need for a cheap labor force. Similarly, a stringent economic adjustment program may look ideal to international economic theorists but may very well lead to political instability as successive governments are overthrown by dissatisfied and impoverished urban workers.
Although it is true that the present priorities as well as the resources of industrialized countries differ markedly from those of third world countries, nevertheless it is essential for us to see both development and education holistically within a world context. The basic principles and political processes that underline decision-making in industrialized countries are very similar to those in third world countries; the nature and processes of development are the same; and education throughout the world has recognizably similar features.
However, in each context new decisions have to be made based on the praxis between theory and reality: based on the physical and human resources available at that specific place and time, and targeted toward specific groups within specific cultures at specific historical stages of development.
Without this specificity, development can result in a mismatch. Imitation of successful external models can result in abysmal failure. Development and education are like a suit of clothes specifically made to fit the body politic and the body national at a particular season of its development. Heavy winter clothes in midsummer are as much a mismatch as a swim-suit in the middle of a Siberian storm.
Within any one country there are many target groups, varying in age, sex, type of work, economic levels, and educational background. Government and students may have varying objectives for undertaking developmental and educational programs, and these objectives, together with the available and affordable resources, will shape their programs.
Educational programs may have rather different roles in different countries and for different communities within the same country. For example, education may be very much the transmission of known values and knowledge in a stable society, whereas it may be the harbinger of new values and revolutionary knowledge in a changing society. Education today is all too often synonymous with western scientific and technological methodologies, which are somewhat antithetical to the traditional values and methodologies of Africa and Asia. Thus, the teacher in an established society will be seen as a reinforcer of accepted values, whereas he or she may be seen as a missionary and pioneer of change in the third world.
Similarly, the status of the teacher varies considerably. In many well-established societies, the teacher's position has been devalued to the point that it is no longer prestigious. Conversely, in many third world countries, the teacher is looked up to as the owner of new knowledge and a leading community leader.
The Definition of Development
The answers to the challenges of development are often more complex than envisaged in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The sixties and seventies saw the inception and initiation of ambitious development programs in third world countries by foreign experts. Grandiose projects were begun with foreign aid and foreign expertise, yet two decades later it is possible to see that in many cases these projects have led to greater underdevelopment rather than to development. Ambitious farming industries have failed despite the wonderful natural resources of Africa. Modern equipment imported a few years ago lies unused because of the lack of spare parts, and spare parts cannot be imported because of the lack of foreign exchange. Yet these very projects may have led to the increased indebtedness which has become the scourge of the Third World.
Perhaps the problem lies in the definition of development. Western experts have tended to define development in their own image. Eastern experts have been equally quick to impose their definitions of development. All too often, the indigenous peoples have not been involved in this fierce debate between East and West—yet, ironically, they and their countries have become the ideological battlegrounds where surrogate wars are fought, wars that have bled the Third World almost to death.
If we accept the premise that development must be defined within a complex and holistic political, regional, socio-cultural, economic, geographic, demographic, scientific and technological context, then the challenge of education must rise to encompass these complexities. Gone are the days when nutrition could be taught outside the context of societal customs and beliefs or family planning imposed without regard to the people's values and scientific level of understanding. Ambitious agricultural development plans are no longer possible without an analysis of the agricultural skills and implements of the participants, and without consultation about their intentions and aspirations.
The definition of development must therefore arise out of a dialogue between the rulers and the ruled, between the so-called experts and the so-called masses; between the educated and the uneducated. This dialogue cannot be a dialogue between equals if the majority of the people remain uneducated and therefore easily manipulated by the forces of feudal fundamentalism, capitalist fascism, or socialist Stalinism. These forces do provide the certainty of totalitarianism and take away the uncertainties of reality. It is not surprising that large numbers of people find comfort in totalitarianism in the face of the dynamic ever-changing present reality. Yet it is essential that education provide the majority with the conceptual tools to face these changes, and indeed education should go further and enable the majority to remake reality for their own benefit.
In trying to find a global, universally acceptable definition of development, I would like to refer to Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. This begins with the satisfaction of basic physical needs such as food, water, and air and ends with personal fulfillment:
- Survival and life sustaining needs such as air, water, food, warmth, tenderness, physical and mental safety;
- Life-protecting needs such as shelter, security, hygiene and preventive health care;
- Life-enriching needs such as education, moral, aesthetic and social values and duties, a sense of self-respect, identity, an assurance of belonging, companionship;
- Life-embellishing needs such as culture; and
- Life "development" needs or the development of innate talents and personal fulfillment (Maslow, 1954).
Maslow's hierarchy, ranging from sheer survival to life-enhancement, can help us focus on the different priorities that various countries may wish to emphasize. Certainly third world countries—where malnutrition, tropical diseases, high infant-mortality rates combined with high birthrates, lack of industrialization combined with cheap raw-materials prices in the international markets, a shortage of skilled manpower combined with a high unemployment rate—will have very different challenges from those of a highly developed country where basic needs are adequately met.
Strategies for Distance Education Development
I have tried to emphasize that strategies must be based on a detailed and careful analysis of specific situations, including the political infrastructure and aspirations of the people, the socio-economic-cultural realities, and the resource bases—especially the human resource base. What may be seen as a prestigious symbol of development in one context may be seen as a useless white elephant in another. Similarly, knowledge which may be seen as basic for survival for one group may be seen as dangerously subversive for another. It is notoriously true that colonial governments in Africa used illiteracy as a tool for domination: widespread literacy was seen as dangerously subversive.
There is an ongoing debate as to how far education can bring about development or whether development begins first and then fuels the need for more and more education as it proceeds. No doubt this is the proverbial chicken-and-egg debate, which can never be satisfactorily resolved! Suffice it to say that development is not possible without education. In traditional societies, children were educated from their earliest years into the norms of society and into the technologies needed for survival. Formal school also took place in organized initiation programs of certain age groups.
Formal classroom schooling also has a long history, extending from the schools of the Greeks, the Islamic schools, and the schools that prepared the children of humble peasants for bureaucratic examinations in ancient China. Education was seen as a means of self-improvement, whether this was scientific knowledge within the Greek system, spiritual improvement within the Islamic system, or material benefit and bureaucratic power within the Chinese system.
If we accept Maslow's hierarchy of needs, then both development and education must begin by satisfying the basic survival needs and only after these are satisfied, go on to higher levels of aspiration. Thus, whether your ideology is a free-market economy or Marxism-Leninism, the first essen-tial would be the adequate provision of basic necessities such as food and water and basic physical security. Having catered for the basics of survival, there is then the need to look at higher forms of human existence both for the community and for the individual.
The very different country resource bases will also mean that the strategies adopted will need to be affordable by users, governments, or other organizers. While certain types of technology such as radio and print are relatively low-cost and relatively available, with a radio costing less than US$10 and printed materials less than a dollar a copy, other types of technology such as television, videos computers, and fax machines are relatively more expensive.
Moreover, it is essential that any technology used must be controllable by the users, by which I mean not necessarily the learners, but the society and culture in which they operate. All too often technologies are imported which cannot be serviced or maintained. For example, to choose television as the main medium for distance education in a country that does not manufacture televisions or television spare parts can only eventually be counterproductive, as constant injections of foreign-aid equipment and foreign expenditure are not usually sustainable in most economies in the long run.
A combination of the appropriate medium, technology, and affordability can mean a vast outreach. For example, US$1 million per annum is sufficient to produce between 4 and 5 million booklets which are distributed to some 3 million primary and secondary school learners in Zimbabwe annually. Similarly, low-cost programs based on radio learning have proved most successful in such countries as Tanzania, Mauritius, and Nicaragua.
In industrialized countries, more advanced technologies have become easily available, making the development of distance education an exciting and flexible alternatives to formal face-to-face teaching.
One of the most important issues enabling distance education programs to be successful is that of the support systems set up: clusters of learners, ready accessibility by telephone to a tutor, regular contact with a tutor through visits, an efficient mail service, weekend or holiday seminars, and so on. Without such support systems, learners become isolated and it becomes impossible to continue long-term study programs. For example, the distance education teacher training program ZINTEC (Zimbabwe Integrated National Teacher Education Course) could not have sustained its impetus without the support system of clusters of three trainees, a district-based tutor for every 50 students, weekend courses, a weekly seminar of the clusters, regular mail contact through which assignments and feedback linked the tutor and learner at least six times a year, printed distance education materials, and a weekly radio program.
It is also important to allow a multi-faceted and flexible approach, not only so that students have a choice of curriculum, approaches, and media, but also to make full use of available institutions. This is particularly so in third world countries, where resources are extremely limited and the institutional infrastructure is meagre.
Given the limited human and financial resources available to third world countries, distance education becomes an invaluable tool for development. Through distance education, one teacher can reach an audience of millions rather than of only a handful. The cost of distance education can be a fraction of that of traditional formal education, thus enabling limited resources to reach a larger population. Zimbabwe's expansion of secondary education from 66,000 pupils in 1979 to 700,000 in 1989,10 years later, was only possible by using a system of school-based distance education with printed materials, science kits, audio cassettes and radio programs being prepared centrally by the Ministry of Education's curriculum development unit and supported by unqualified teachers who had undergone short in-service courses of two to three weeks. This has effected the democratization of secondary education at an affordable cost at an unparalleled pace, an achievement that would not have been possible using only conventiona
l formal education methodologies.
Further work is now being done by the Zimbabwe Institute of Distance Education (ZIDE), which was set up specifically to provide mass secondary education using either distance education methodologies alone, or combining distance education with face-to-face teaching.
Of particular interest is the use of distance education for a hands-on experiment-based '0' level science course evaluated by the Cambridge University Examination Syndicate. This course (known as ZimSci), using mainly locally-made science equipment packaged for use by schools or by individuals, and highly dependent on distance education printed materials and audiotapes, has enjoyed a successful history since its establishment within the school system in 1981.
Zimbabwe is now at a stage where it is feeling the pressing need to expand its tertiary education sector significantly. Tertiary education is notoriously expensive, yet without a cadre of high-level personnel, third world countries will not have the research ability and manpower to formulate and implement creative and professionally sound solutions to the present impasse of underdevelopment. Distance education, combined with periods of conventional education, offers the possibility of a substantial expansion of tertiary education capacity, as well as a sharing of costs—either within Africa, such as through SADCC, the Southern African Development Coordination Conference, or through the Commonwealth of Learning.
Historically "correspondence" education, the precursor to distance education, has strong roots in the private sector. Long before governments took it upon themselves to be responsible for education, private individuals, non-governmental organizations, and churches were deeply involved in all aspects of education. It has been said that early Greek writers such as Socrates and Plato put their thoughts on paper for the edification of students whom they could not meet face to face, and that St. Paul was the first distance education writer through his famous Epistles!
Today, privatized distance education contributes substantially to educational provision. In the twentieth century, it has attained a certain commercial character, with curriculum materials becoming marketable consumables. This is no doubt inevitable in market economies where every aspect of life responds to the forces of supply and demand and market forces, including educational provision.
The advantage of privatized distance education is that it can swiftly respond to demands for both in volume and content. Its disadvantages include possible exploitation of clientele by its quality or relevance. Therefore it is essential that mechanisms be set up by both governments and reputable private distance education institutions to ensure that quality, relevance, and costs are reasonable. With such checks and balances effectively in place, private distance education can contribute meaningfully at a minimal cost to governments.
The balance between state-run institutions and locally-run institutions, whether these are small private companies in the U.S.A. or community-run village schools in Africa, is necessarily a delicate one. In all countries, the state plays a critical role in establishing educational infrastructure, in laying out curricular outlines, and in maintaining standards. A case in point is the British system, which has transformed itself recently from a laissez-faire diversity to a highly structured compulsory curriculum of which some 80 percent is prescribed. Similarly, in the United States, more than 75 percent of educational institutions are state-run, with private enterprise assuming a supportive role.
In the same way, many established formal educational institutions such as primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, curriculum development departments and university faculties—can be usefully extended to provide distance education facilities to a much wider clientele. Although the distance materials themselves must generally be prepared at centrally organized institutions where distance education specialists can be located, the delivery of these services could benefit from far greater dispersal. Short, in-service courses for primary and secondary teachers could provide the much-needed support infrastructure and contact that can make or break a distance education course.
There has been some debate regarding the housing of distance education units within traditional educational systems vis-á-vis establishing them as separate units. The Australian University system provides a model for incorporating distance education within existing university departments; the British Open University provides a model of a specialized institution completely independent of the more formal system. Both models have enjoyed relative success.
The incorporation of distance education into existing institutions has many advantages. These include the flexibility students can enjoy by combining periods of distance education with periods of formal education; the status and prestige of established courses and institutions being enjoyed by distance education students; the possibility of distance education providing a suitable medium to expand outreach considerably; and cost effectiveness, in that an existing department of specialists may be utilized to a greater effect with the addition of one or two distance education specialists and administrators.
However, utilizing established institutions can also have liabilities. For example, established departments may pay inadequate attention to distance education methodology and the student needs peculiar to students being at a distance. All too often, established departments and their staff are ignorant of the vast potential offered by distance education; they are unable to grasp and manipulate the intricacies of distance education methodologies. The end result is that many such distance education courses are mediocre and provide an unsatisfactory service to their students.
The alternative of a specialized unit has many attractions: specialist staff can be recruited, specialized structures can be established and maintained, and distance education students can be the focal point rather than a peripheral interest of the course. However, such specialized units can become very expensive depending on how resources are man-aged, and they may not be cost-effective for small numbers of students.
The mix of utilizing existing institutions and establishing specialist units must be carefully made in specific situations, taking into account particular localized needs and available resources. In many cases a small, highly specialized unit linking up with a larger number of less-specialized, but highly dispersed, units may be more successful than a system that is entirely isolated from the mainstream.
Strategies for the development of distance education cannot fail to look at the potential clientele as well as their reasons for desiring a higher level of education and skills. The last century has seen such a rapid technological transformation that technologies become obsolete within one generation. Obsolescence of knowledge and skills can overtake a people in even less than a generation. Yet third world countries, where even basic literacy may be rare, have to interact and even compete with the most advanced, industrialized countries. Not surprisingly, third world countries are often at a distinct disadvantage.
Since knowledge and skills are at a premium, education and human resource development in general, and distance education in particular assume a key role in assisting those who are disadvantaged by their lack of knowledge and skills. In third world countries, the majority are disadvantaged, whereas in developed industrialized countries, the minority are. In both, women may be further disadvantaged.
The educationally disadvantaged inevitably become or remain the materially disadvantaged. In addressing the question of distance education programs for women and other socially disadvantaged groups, it is necessary not only to analyze their needs using Maslow's hierarchy of needs as a measure, but also to open a dialogue with them so that the learners' priorities and values can be taken into consideration. All too often in the past, well-meaning but paternalistic educationalists have imposed upon learners educational content and methodologies that were meaningless, useless, or unsuitable. Nutrition programs have been disseminated based on a diet of meat and eggs in communities where meat and eggs are rare, if available at all. The baking of cakes has become a compulsory component of home economics in societies that lack ovens, wheat, and eggs. Thus, education can become an alienating status symbol, useless in the battle against material poverty or economic oppression.
One of the key issues in education is that of constant renewal through a process of evaluation. The needs and priorities of one decade will necessarily be different from those of the next decade. It is in the nature of things that what were once major problems to be tackled may become irrelevant issues to the next generation. Indeed, major success in tackling fundamental problems will mean the disappearance of those problems as focal points. Thus, while one generation may place food security at a premium, the next generation may take food security for granted.
Evaluation is of critical importance in education, as a stagnant education system will fail to respond to the dynamics of development. Although certain fundamental skills and knowledge may remain basic, others that were taken for granted by the last generation may be completely untenable today. For example, the last two decades of bio-genetics research have completely transformed this field of the natural sciences; and the political economy of the Stalinist era is no longer tenable in the Gorbachev era.
Technical and professional levels also change as do the cultural contexts, necessitating a constant renewal of materials and methodologies vis-á-vis their relevance to users. Thus an integrated system of internal and external evaluation will need to be built into distance education materials which, because of their very nature, have a way of outliving their usefulness. Materials prepared two or three decades ago may still be in circulation, sometimes with diminishing returns.
Conclusion
Education is developed within the context of a real world with real problems and challenges. It offers people the tools for overcoming problems and rising to greater heights in terms of values, concepts, knowledge, and skills. These tools cover three major areas: the area of natural sciences, which allows human beings to be in contact with their environment; the area of social sciences, which allows human beings to create their socio-economics milieu for interaction and interrelationship; and the area of communication, which allows human beings to build up better understanding amongst themselves. Education is concerned with the development of this intricate intellectual, technological, and social complex. Given that, education interacts on all aspects of the life of the nation, of the family, and of the individual. It has tremendous potential to bring about a change for the better.
Distance education methodologies can break the boundaries of time and place and offer a flexibility that enables people in different circumstances to enjoy the advantages of education. Moreover, the possibility of providing education to all at reasonably low cost opens the way further for mass education in third world countries, which are likely to be hamstrung by tight financial constraints for some time to come. Yet unless third world countries develop their vast human resource potential through education, they will continue to suffer from the underdevelopment and dependency that characterize today's unbalanced and unjust situation. Thus, education can become a tool of liberation for third world countries—liberation from the cycle of poverty and deprivation that is the symptom of a people unable to control their destinies scientifically, politically, and economically. Without the knowledge that brings about liberation, third world countries will continue to be buffeted by the vagaries of an internat
ional order that they do not control. They will continue to be the victims of circumstance, prey to the traditional fundamentalism of the past and possibly to the totalitarianism of the future. Education, and more specifically distance education, offers a brighter prospect.
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