Today I read a chapter on a newly bought
book and the first book on my area of study entitled “Contexts of Adult
Education: Canadian Perspective”, edited by Tara Fenwick, Tom Nesbit and Bruce
Spencer and published by Thomson Educational Publishing, Inc. The chapter that
I read today was my interest because it was written by Prof. Jane Dawson and Prof.
Shauna Butterwick as the latter is the one who is going to teach the first
class on September 6, 2011 in the UBC.
The name of the chapter is “Adult Education
and the Arts”. As the name suggest, the chapter deals with how adults can be
and are being educated through arts. The authors furnish their chapters with a
lot of Canadian practices in educating its adult population through the medium
of documentary films, storytelling, theatre, drama and so on.
The chapter gave me basically two basic
perspectives to see adult education. Firstly, art is an inevitable part of
human life. It is not an obligatory thing that one should be a professional
artist to be educated and it is also not true that one must have artistic
skills to educate others. Art is a human passion and a life in itself. There is
not a human being who is devoid of art. In every culture, in every nook and
cranny of this world there are arts and people are following them. Art has a
long history and it is the most significant part of human culture and a way of
learning too.
Secondly, I saw art through the perspective
of lifelong learning. For me adult education is a part of lifelong learning. By
reflecting on the reading of this chapter now I can rightly say that art is an
inevitable part for fostering lifelong learning. One of the reasons, knowingly
or unknowingly, lifelong learning has survived as a tacit way of learning
because of the arts people have been following from the very beginning of their
civilization. For instance, the skill of carpentry, the skill of tanning
leathers and many other skills survived and matured through generational
learning. Undoubtedly it has been getting transferred to this day from
grandparents to parents and parents to their siblings. Now, the work of present
generation is to make it more systematic and make people more professional. Now
such skills need technological fitting in right manners.
Needless to mention, all people irrespective
of their age, sex, race, culture and so are fanatic towards one or other forms
of art. Some people may like music, some people may like drama and some people
may like film. Every country rich and poor, small and big have to make learning
opportunities available through such and such forms of art. Developing
countries like Nepal have to take an approach at national level probably an
agenda like “Lifelong Learning through Art”. One of the most important advantages
of this approach would be learning for all goes through the medium of
entertainments.
I acknowledge Prof Butterwick and Prof
Dawson.
Thanks!!!
