Pause for awhile and think about the implications of these images
and what they indicate about the respective roles of teachers,
students and adults:
What assumptions are being made about the processes of
teaching and learning?
How compatible are the roles of "teacher" and "student"-
as perceived by this group of extension officers?
How compatible are the roles of "adult" and "student"?
What is likely to happen when the "adult" becomes a "stu-
dent"?


All the images related to students by the extension officers were of
someone who is essentially passive: someone who is waiting to be
nurtured by a teacher and filled with knowledge.
All the images for teacher were active and potent ones: someone
who brings light, someone who is knowledgeable and experienced,
someone in control of the learning process.
All the images of adult were also of someone who is active and
potent: mature, experienced and knowledgeable-and also accus-
tomed to being in control over certain aspects of his life.
The images and qualities arrayed across the board added up to a
very traditional-and rather limited-picture of what learning and
teaching are about. The workshop participants saw education as
essentially a process of one who knows, transmitting his knowledge
to one who does not know. In terms of traditional attitudes to
schooling, there is a compatibility between the group's images of
student and teacher. The student is a receptacle waiting patiently
to be filled, a plant waiting for the nourishment needed for its
growth. The teacher is both an authority and in authority. This
model of education is one of dependency.
However, there is not a compatibility between the images for
student and those for adult. The participants associated adult with
qualities to do with experience, maturity, knowledge and responsi-
bility. Not a problem when the adult becomes a teacher-but a
possible source of tension when the adult becomes a student. If the
educational process is as the workshop participants saw it, then the
adult is being asked to return to a childlike situation when he is put
in the role of a learner.