Learning beyond Formal Education

Education has long been recognized as a powerful tool for social change and development. It can empower individuals and communities by stimulating reflective citizenship and active participation in cultural, political, and economic life, and by enabling people and communities to negotiate the increasing challenges and changes of their lifeworlds. Education can also be a force of disruption, inculcation of external values, and social abstraction—lifting people out of relatively stable contexts into new cultures of high expectation and ungrounded desire. In Boera, for example, as we discussed earlier, modern education has displaced older forms of learning. Now, only one woman