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ANOTHER LOOK AT LEARNING:
DEVELOPING HUMAN CAPACITY
by Beryl Levinger
Every day 67,000 women,
men, and children are added to the world's poor.
This means that during 1996 nearly 25 million additional
people will go hungry, live in substandard housing,
have little or no access to medical care, and have
little hope for a better life. Last year, at a summit
in Copenhagen, under United Nations auspices, world
leaders gathered to address these horrifying statistics.
The conclusion they reached was that people-centered
development is the key to eradicating poverty. In
other words, providing people of all ages with productive
learning opportunities is essential, especially in
developing nations.
Beryl Levinger, senior director for international
programs for the Education Development Center in Westport,
Conn., and recent Wingspread conference participant,
calls lifelong learning the process of "developing
human capacity." She explores human capacity development
and what it will mean for individuals and institutions
in her new book Critical Transitions: Human Capacity
Development Across the Lifespan. While her focus
is on fostering human capacity in developing nations,
the questions she raises are just as relevant for
learners in more "developed" countries. Following
is an excerpt from her book.
For some it is the global era or the third wave.
Still others describe it as a post-job period, or
the continuing age of the future. Regardless of the
nomenclature, the profusion of information technologies,
the globalization of the economy, and the attendant
upheavals unleashed by these two forces have combined
at the end of the 20th century to create an environment
which calls for more knowledge, more abstract reasoning,
more intelligence, and more initiative to earn a livelihood
than ever before. Flexibility, adaptability, collaborativeness,
and problem-solving prowess together make up the mortar
that binds this new knowledge and emerging context
together.
Human capacity refers to an individual's ability
to perform tasks which are necessary to survive and
prosper. More specifically, it describes the constellation
of skills, attitudes, and behaviors individuals exhibit
in the multiple roles they play: community member,
family member, learner, worker, consumer, and citizen.
These roles are all situated in the context of four
specific core domains of productive and purposeful
interaction that lie at the heart of human capacity:
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family life;
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livelihood;
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environmental stewardship; and
-
civil society.
The building blocks of human capacity development
are participation opportunities, the potential productive
interactions in which individuals can engage that
allow them to contribute to the development of their
nations, communities, and families. Participation
opportunities span the course of a person's life cycle
and vary accordingly. They include the chance to go
to school, secure a livelihood, influence political
or civic affairs, promote family development, and
protect the environment. Among other things, such
opportunities also encompass the chance to partake
in agricultural extension activities, recreation,
cultural events, or entrepreneurial behavior. Human
capacity development is what happens when available
participation opportunities are accessed and new participation
opportunities created.
Human capacity has both personal and social relevance.
Capable individuals are able to access and use opportunities
available in the environment to secure the conditions
necessary for themselves and their families to realize
their innate potential. Capable societies, in turn,
are those which can equitably maximize the participation
opportunities available to their citizens.
Human capacity development, therefore, is the product
of an ongoing interaction between the individual and
society. In light of this framework, the key to human
capacity development is equitably enabling large numbers
of children, women, and men to acquire:
1) specific content in relation to a range of participation
opportunities; 2) specific interaction styles which
place a premium on flexibility, adaptability, collaborativeness,
and problem solving; and 3) specific cognitive strategies
for achieving higher levels of thinking and problem
solving in these content areas.
Over the next generation, the backdrop against which
the human capacity development drama is enacted will
be substantially altered. As people become accustomed
(or suffer the consequences of their recalcitrance)
to the idea of life-long learning as a prerequisite
for success in every imaginable pursuit, the pool
of learners will become more diverse in age, preparation,
learning goals, backgrounds, and needs. Existing institutions--schools,
employers, training institutes, extension agencies,
clinics--will need to learn how to cope with this
diversity.
Institutional coping strategies will undoubtedly
take many different forms. In some cases it will entail
a narrowing down of the client base, while for others,
the choice will be to widen up the constituencies
addressed through programs and services. For example,
as early childhood development practitioners increasingly
come to value the importance of nutrition and health
factors in the cognitive, social, and physical growth
of young children, they may seek to substantially
increase their outreach and service delivery to parents
through training, social promotion, and extension
work. Such widening up confers new challenges on those
whose task it is to design and implement the outreach
program.
In contrast, some organizations working to generate
livelihood opportunities may narrow down their activities
to serve only the formal or informal sectors, because
they recognize that specificity with respect to skills
and settings will best serve their clients' needs.
In both instances, organizational strategic planning
skills will prove critical. ...
It is against this backdrop that a host of new questions
present themselves for further reflection, analysis,
and most importantly, experimentation. These queries
could readily form the heart of an action-research
agenda for human capacity development:
- What
features of informal education, training, and schooling
practice can be most readily modified to help learners
learn how to learn?
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What can schools, training institutions, and extension
services do to achieve heightened community participation
(where community is understood to refer not only
to parents or learners, but also to employers)?
What implications are there--both negative and positive--of
such an enlarged community involvement?
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How can new insights into the nature of learning
and human capacity development best be brought to
bear on educational, training, and social development
programs in light of available, human, and financial
resources?
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How can the transfer of knowledge between school
or training program and community be made as seamless
as possible? How can whole communities be helped
to use current knowledge to construct new knowledge?
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How does the new emphasis on adaptability, flexibility,
collaborativeness, and problem solving influence
our perspective on "learning handicaps" or "impediments
to learning?" For example, which is the more profound
disability--immobility or an inability to work well
with others?
Human capacity development is rooted in the deepest
of ethical and moral principles: that all people,
regardless of their station in life, have the potential,
the right--as well as the responsibility--to contribute
meaningfully to their families, communities, and nations.
They also have the right to enjoy the benefits that
flow from such contributions.
The author and social critic Ken Kesey once noted,
"You can count the seeds in an apple, but you can't
count the apples in a seed." What kind of future will
we have if more attention is paid to human capacity
development? Our imaginations may be too limited to
fully grasp all the benefits that a just, equitable,
and sustainable approach to human capacity development
can confer on society."
Article and illustration excerpted from Critical
Transitions: Human Capacity Development Across the
Lifespan available from the Education Development
Center, tel.: 617-969-7100, fax: 332-6405. It also
can be downloaded from the World Wide Web at http://www.edc.org.
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