Resumen

WOLHUTER, C.C.. Provision of education to vulnerable groups in society. Tydskr. geesteswet. [online]. 2019, vol.59, n.4, pp.627-641. ISSN 2224-7912.  http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2224-7912/2019/v59n4a13.

Currently education is widely looked upon as a panacea for all societal ills and challenges, and the global community is feverishly pursuing the provision of education to all. This article is a position paper defending the thesis that in the crusade of education for all, and the theoretical superstructure directing the discourse about education for all, a set of vulnerable groups in society has become invisible. The aim of this article is to bring this set of vulnerable groups into the map of the public and academic discourse on education and to serve as prolegomena for the drafting of a research agenda for the provision of education to these groups. The article commences with an outline of the historical evolution of models of social stratification dominant in both the public discourse and analyses in the social sciences. The prototype was Marx's model that laid down socio-economic status as the main dimension of social stratification. This dimension was later supplemented by two additional dimensions, with the result that the public and academic discourse about equality has come to be dominated by the so-called trinity of inequality: socio-economic status, gender and race or ethnicity. Through the cracks of this model have fallen a number of vulnerable groups, which have, therefore, disappeared from the public and academic discourse. Vulnerable groups in society can be defined as people who, because of a set of particular circumstances, do not have access to the same set of social support systems to which people typically have access. These systems include family structures (including structures of the extended family), systems of the immediate community in which these people live, governmental structures (such as access to social grants or protection offered by labour laws) and the various forms of capital identified by Bourdieu, namely physical or economic capital, cultural capital and social capital. The article enumerates and briefly discusses the following categories of vulnerable groups (without claiming this list to be exhaustive): refugees, dislodged people or illegal immigrants; the unemployed; street children; people dependent on social grants; parentless or guardianless children; the destitute; domestic workers; the poor; chronically ill people; people living from garbage; and car guards. Against this occurrence of vulnerable people in society, the potential of education as an ameliorative force should be assessed. After being on the fringe of society for centuries (even millennia) and being viewed as of no economic value, the decades after the Second World War suddenly saw an appreciation for the value of education. Causal factors to this new belief include the fact that adult literacy on a world level reached the 50% mark in 1955, the founding of UNESCO and the appearance of the Human Capital and Modernisation Theory. In a short time, education has come to be seen as a solution to every societal ill. Advocates for education can indeed marshal a raft of empirical research supporting their belief. However, the ameliorative societal effect of education is no universal, deterministic law. The societal effect depends on the learner(s) and the contextual ecology (geography, demography, social system, economy, political system and religio- and life philosophical systems) of each case. Therefore, while education appears to be the obvious way to empower people finding themselves to be members of vulnerable categories, for this potential of education to be realised, the explication of the contextual ecology of each of the vulnerable categories should be placed on the Education research agenda, followed by a development plan for education for each group, based on the results of such analyses.

Palabras clave : Adult literacy; education for all; Education research agenda; human rights; Human Capital Theory; Marxism; Modernisation Theory; social stratification; UNESCO; vulnerable groups.

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