Challenges for adult continuing education in small states

Abstract

Small states face several challenges, related to scale, in adult continuing education (ACE). They include lack of economies of scale, lack of precise and limited specialisations, restricted markets, high cost of duplication of resources and possible low international visibility among its potential drawbacks. To emphasise these is to entrench oneself in a deficit paradigm. To emphasise, on the contrary, the obverse, which can lead to alternative strategies and imaginative ones at that, is tantamount to bringing strengths to the international table – imaginative ways of going about things, perhaps, to use the overused and outworn cliché, ways of ‘thinking outside the box’, attributing agency to small state operators. It would involve thinking somewhat, but not exclusively, along the lines of what a small state innovator from Malta, Edward De Bono (2014) conceptualised as ‘Lateral Thinking’, seeing issues from different and not conventional angles, calling for disruptive reasoning with regard to what is taken for granted which often should mean taken for granted in large, culturally influential contexts far removed from those of micro or smaller ones. Among ACE’s perennial features are those of flexible specialisation, multifunctional approaches, intimacy, monopoly and migration. Many small states face these issues in terms of populations and restricted land mass, without setting arbitrary figures to distinguish them from others. [excerpt]