Training of human resources in rural areas: a proposal of non-formal process

Abstract

The historical antecedents which make reference to the continuous preocupation for the integral development of the rural areas, demonstrate us the constant implications of the important role which education has to perfom. In the perspective of quantifying the efforts realized in this endeavour, there is a minor balance -with respect to ther sectors- which indicate that education maintain some working criteria which undoubtedly has a great need for renewal. The rural area cannot identify a type of integral development based on a unidirectional education, since its programme content, although having a universal value in the education and formation of man, do not correspond with the different and peculiar sociological nor geo-political economic reality as the rural area is; an environment differed with the concept of urban culture known and supported by a type of culture based on scientific and technological development which characterize our times and which in that sector has not arrived till now with the deserved quantitative nor qualitative depth. In the formation of human resources in the rural areas -vital prioritary resources which is the hope of the development of other resources needed by the environment- by means of the non-formal process in the role given to education is, nowadays, the most solid alternative and the variable which could resume a series of sectorial trials applied in order to obtain the full integrated and potentially human development of the rural area. To this alternative the economic, social, political and cultural efforts, could agree with exactness to its own objectives; in other words, all the efforts which nowadays are applied in plans to potentiate the rural areas in order to eliminate the high degree of an almost integral margination suffered in their relationship with the developped society and universally supported by science and technology. Education by means of non formal process in this objective or indicated supposition has to start innovating from the formation of the professional till the educational processes: the educator has to be formed in the light of the objectives being a human resource for the rural area which diversify the experiences of a culture which is ecologically still forgotten (the living relationship between man and his natural medium, for example). It cannot be a professional who dominate the transmission of knowledge culturally acquired by the human society. It has to be a professional -educator- who knows how to interprete the "intuitive knowledge" and codify it in a knowledge which is progressively advantageous for the interests of the integral development of the area. The educational processes cannot be dynamic nor active, thinking only of the institutional entity -the school- since the efforts of the integral development are directed towards a concept that the rural school or rural environment is the promoting center of the cultural development of the area; the institution is not, therefore, representative of the degree of culture of the area. In short, the non formal process impels the innovations of education necessary in the rural area nowadays.