CHAPTER TWO METHODOLGY
3.2 HIV/AIDS And Education
There has been a substantial amount of research undertaken in the field of
HIVIAIDS in sub Saharan Africa in recent years. Most of this research mentions the role education has to play in the new AIDS infected world we live in. Learning institutions cannot be the same as those in an Aids free world - challenged by this pandemic the paradigm of education is changing.
The foreword of the July 2002 edition of 'Perspectives in Education', states that the general agreement, at both national and international levels, is that there are four principal areas of conceril for educators. These are:
• Prevention, helping prevent the spread of aids
• Social support, working with others to provide care and support
• Protection - protecting the education sectors capacity to provide adequate levels of education and responding to new learning needs
• Management - managing the education sectors response to the crisis.
Educators must of necessity move from a narrow 'HIV Education Curriculum Campaign' towards a broader' HIV and Education' campaign. A broad
multidisciplinary approach by educators to the pandemic is essential. (Coombe, 2002, p viii)
Moving from a narrow health and life skills curriculum approach towards a new perception of 'HIV -and education' in its broadest sense requires a clearer understanding of what that broader sense entails. Carol Coombe of the University of Pretoria envisages things such as: creating an HIV/AIDS knowledge bank serving all disciplines, training for a predicted labour shortage, coping with changing training requirements (more specialists required in health and social welfare etc) and planning to mitigate HIV's impact through labour law, codes, regulations, counseling, testing and treatment, to be at the core of what is required. (Coombe, 2001)
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Coombe also believes that we need to understand the pandemic in a more orderly way and to look at what are the practical questions that must be asked about 'HIV/AIDS and education' She states that we need much more quantitative and qualitative information specific to the education sector, this includes: rates of prevalence for various groups of learners and educators; attrition, attendance, enrolment, dropout and completion rates; education costs; changing education requirements; the complexity of grade cohorts; how existing knowledge and value systems complicate life skills teaching; and the current state of AIDS orphans. Such information needs reporting, disseminating, collating and archiving information.
Even more important, such information must be analysed if it is to contribute to our understanding of how the pandemic threatens the education sector. We need to be able to evaluate potential strategies and programmes, as well as implementation procedures and practical success stories. Only in this way will it be possible to be creative and flexible in providing education in increasingly complex environments, to increasingly complex cohorts of learners. Together a holistic approach by the sector to problems in the sector is now required. (Coombe, 2000a)
Coombe asks the question 'What do we need to achieve in practice in the next decade, 2000-20 IO?' She answers that education has a long-term contribution to make to HIVIAIDS impact reduction by helping to reduce poverty and ignorance, discrimination and inequality. Within the next decade, Coombe states that there are perhaps four very specific practical goals for the education sector with regard to HIVIAIDS. These are:
(a) Learning: to collect as much information as possible about the pathology of the disease, and disseminate what is known through the education sector.
(b) Preventing and controlling: to continue to support government policy on preventing and controlling the spread of HIVIAIDS by making systematic interventions: teaching the principles of safe sex to learners in schools and institutions (Life Skills curriculum for example); providing guidelines to all educators about the disease and how they can protect themselves and children under their care (HIVIAIDS Emergency: Guidelines for Educators; workplace policy and regulations for example); providing support for learners and educators who are infected or affected by HIVIAIDS (counselling; culture of care in schools and institutions; school support units for example); applying constitutional, human and other rights related to HIV/AIDS prevalence rigorously and consistently in schools and institutions (analysing the law;
applying the law and regulations which interpret it; providing guidance to all those responsible for interpreting and applying the law for example).
(c) Understanding: to accept that the pandemic has not been halted or even slowed, that we have to learn to live with it, that it is not 'business as usual', and in so doing, to understand how HIV/AIDS affects our educational environment and make plans for factoring it into educational planning for the future.
(d) Responding: to seek ways to stabilise the education system before it is further compromised by the pandemic, in such a way as to sustain an adequate and acceptable quality and level of education provision.
(Coombe, 2000b, p4)
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The World Education Forum held in Dakar in April 2000, noted that a key objective of an international strategy must be to realize the enormous potential that the
education system offers as a vehicle to help reduce the incidence of HIVIAIDS and to alleviate its impact on society. (UNESCO, 2000a, p23, cited in Coombe and Kelly, 2001) But more soberly the Forum Final Report also recalls UNAIDS
Executive Directors statement that AIDS constitutes one of the biggest threats to the global education agenda. In other words, what HIV/AIDS does to the human body, it also does to institutions, it undermines those institutions that protect us. (Coombe and Kelly 2001))
These two perspectives - education as a vehicle for reducing the incidence of HIV/AIDS and education as itself being threatened by the disease - run through much of the literature on the role of education in a world with AIDS. (Cf Coombe, 2000a, Kelly 2000) Itcould be suggested then that education systems must first secure themselves against the onslaught of HIVIAIDS before coming to the assistance of their clientele. An education system which does not protect itself against HIVIAIDS will not be able to serve as a vehicle for reducing the incidence of the disease.
Coombe and Kelly (200 I) state that at the level of pedagogy and the curriculum, responding creatively to HIV/AIDS necessitates considerate adjustment and reform.
In the context of HIVIAIDS, cUrriCUIUlTI must extend further than the development of knowledge, and address attitudes, values and lifeskills needed for making and acting on the most appropriate and positive health related decisions. This is critically important in equipping individuals for their personal combat against HIV/AIDS. They also state that other responsibilities such as: Replenishing the skills being lost through premature deaths of skilled and qualified adults,
transmitting skills to young people when the practitioners who should pass on the training are no longer alive, and preparing young people, for the immediate assumption of adult economic responsibilities e.g. as heads of households, are equally impoliant.
Evidence is accumulating that education helps individuals protect themselves against HIV infection, (Fylkesnes et aI, 1999). But how does education protect against infection.
Vandemoortele and Delamonica (2000) provide some direct and indirect evidence that points to a changing social profile in the disease, and assert that this is due to the increased knowledge, information and awareness which education provides.
However they are at pains to point out that the evidence does not allow us to conclude exactly how the education- vaccine against HIV works. In Coombe and Kelly (2001) the question has been asked 'does education protect against HIV infection because of the health skills and HIV/AIDS education that are provided, or is there something inherent in the very process of becoming more educated that equips individuals with the skills and motivation to protect themselves against infection?' They go on to explain that there is no universally agreed answer, though
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clearly both aspects are important. Almost certainly, however, the general impact of education in itself is the most significant factor. The reason for this view is that the positive correlation between level of education and HIV infection or high risk behaviour is changing even among those whose formal education included little if any health skills and AIDS information. But what seems to be the greatest
significance in reducing HIV/AIDS vulnerability is the fact of being educated, of having attended school for a certain number of years.
Before trying to unravel some of the Inechanisms that may be at work here, it is worth noting somewhat similar effects in relation to both poverty reduction and improved
health. It may well be the same in the case of HIV infection. Vulnerability declines with years of education, but how exposure to education and training works to bring about this decline is far from being clear. Part of the reason, however, may lie in the way that education brings about changes in the information handling, affective and socio-cultural domains. As education becomes more widely diffused in a
community, it becomes more acceptable that women and girls should be more involved in decisions affecting themselves and ultimately affecting their sexual and social lives. It was interesting to note that the literature on HIVIAIDS and educated focused almost entirely on prevention with no specific mention of education
regarding treatment.