| Chapter 2: | Review of Relevant Literature |
The authors defined “community improvement education” as that which is “designed to strengthen local and national institutions and processes through instruction in such matters as local and national government, cooperatives, community projects …” (p. 15). Finally, the researchers described “community education” as “designed to develop particular knowledge and skills associated with various economic activities and useful in making a living” (p. 15).
During the course of their work, Coombs & Ahmed (1974) realized that it was important to ascertain the nature of rural development and non-formal education. They wrote, “The literature proved of little help on these questions and thus we were forced to improvise some questions of our own. The problem is not simply to devise a dictionary definition; it was the profoundly more difficult task of trying to discover the real nature of non-formal education and of rural development and to understand the relationship between the two” (p. 232).
From their study, Coombs and Ahmed concluded that, when properly administered, non-formal education “is an indispensable and potent instrument of rural development” (p. 235).They also found that, with the right circumstances, “even the poorest of countries … should be able to mobilize the resources and human energies for a considerable expansion of non-formal education in rural areas” (p. 235).
Finally, they concluded that developing countries will make more progress in non-formal education if they receive help from other countries. “There is no shortage of ways for external agencies to assist strategically, but to do so with greater effect they will be required to alter considerably their past policies, doctrines and modes of operation” (p. 235).
In his 1986 study, author and Latin America researcher Thomas La Belle reviewed the main trends of the 1970s and 1980s in non-formal education programs among the adult poor of Latin America and the Caribbean. He also dealt with the overall concept of adult education, looked at some programs from the vantage point of change and strategy, and questioned “the viability of such efforts to promote the well being of the poor” (La Belle, 1986, p. vi). In addition, La Belle examined “the dynamics of project control and implementation,” along with their “ideological underpinnings,” to successfully ascertain the various ways in which “programs contribute to the achievement of project and organizational goals as well as to the social and economic enhancement of project participants” (p. vi).