• acting as a forum for the exchange of information. Two simple examples are
advice from a classmate that the respondent’s son, who had problems with his
ears, should wear a hat when swimming to stop water getting into his ears; and
information from a teacher that helped a respondent’s neighbour to deal with
her health problem.
• the provision of health and safety information. Respondents confirmed that they
had used this knowledge to deal with their children’s health, and they mentioned
that having the knowledge made them feel “more comfortable”.
• developing the inclination and ability, as well as providing the opportunity to
read relevant literature. Several respondents mentioned that they had used books
to learn about health conditions suffered by relatives. For example, Gamal’s
wife was diagnosed with schizophrenia soon after the birth of their child and he
used books to learn about the condition.
The interaction between different forms of educational effect can be well illustrated
using these categories. For example, the general confidence effect enables people to
articulate their cases better, and to provide the kinds of corrective input that any
service needs in order to maintain quality. Basic language skills are essential to such
articulation, obviously, but the confidence factor goes well beyond this. Using books
is obviously dependent upon a certain level of literacy competence; but it is also
linked to having access to books, which is often provided by membership of an
educational institution. This in turn is not simply a question of whether a person is or
is not a current student enrolled in an institution with a library, but whether they have
within themselves a model of library usage.
8.1 Health and self
At a more fundamental level, learning enables people to achieve, maintain or retrieve
a sense of identity, essential to good mental and psychological health. The categories
into which our data fall again overlap considerably but it is possible to distinguish the
following aspects, without entering into detailed psychological theory:
a) a sense of one’s own identity, distinct from, although attached to, other
members of one’s family or the wider community. This obviously came through
particularly strongly in our fieldwork because of our focus in one project on the
parents of young children, but other people have had similar experiences. For
example, we can hypothesise that carers may well experience the same effect,
with education providing a means of preserving their own identity within a
particularly demanding personal relationship.
b) self-awareness or self-understanding. Learning provides people with insight into
and understanding of their own personality and dispositions. This may be as a
consequence of education that touches on these issues directly, for example
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