The Challenges of Lifelong Learning - Essay Example

Lifelong learning As the 21st century unfolds, humanity finds itself at a crossroads. The Ronald Barnett (2002, p. 7) puts it thus: As the old millennium leaves us with thousand years of disagreement, lack of knowledge, conflict and separation, we find ourselves at a crossroads in the progress of human society. A beguiling vision of the renewal of our unique independence, of a valuable liberty of thought and principles, of unselfish contribution to the betterment of community and the life of others, and of a mature, open-minded sense of ethics more advanced than life on this planet has ever known is before us. The insights, the infrastructures and the tools to encourage learning throughout life, and to unlock the vast creative potential in each one of us, are now moving into place. They can help us to revitalize a new harmony with nature, with each other and with the concept of a divine intelligence, however we may define it. In a sense, such visionary declarations articulate what many of us may want to believe about the times we live in: an image of a glorious future through lifelong learning; a rebirth of creativity, of culture, of imagination, of invention, of partnership; the notion that finally we have the tools and the vision to enable human beings to realize their own enormous potential for good. It is indeed a beguiling vision. And it contrasts strongly with the evidence we see around us. The increasing violence in inner cities, the occasional acts of genocide when pathological dictatorship or tribal hatreds spill over into brutality, the abomination of the destruction of the New York twin towers, the growth of fundamentalist ignorance and suppression of rational thought in many religions-they all point to an unprecedented erosion of human values rendered all the more appalling by the use of ever more sophisticated weapons of communication and oppression. But at least it presents a stark choice. Both scenarios are possible, as are a hundred more in between. And the only thing preventing the achievement of the desirable outcomes has to be rooted in the persistence of poverty and the chronic lack of education in more than half the world. It will not be solved by the manufacture and application of more weapons of destruction. H G Wells was correct when he said that 'the whole of human history is a battle between education and catastrophe' (cited in Fischer, 2000, p. 265). Those of us immersed in a lifelong learning culture can all sense that the new millennium brings with it the opportunity for a new beginning. But we can all see, as well, the scale of the task ahead just to make it happen, perhaps starting in our own communities and branching out from there with new understandings, new persuasions, new insights, new wisdom. Thanks to inter-governmental organizations-UNESCO, OECD, APEC, the Council of Europe, The European Commission and others - and some of the more enlightened liberal democracies, the lifelong learning movement is now rampaging around the whole world, from Europe to South Africa and from North America to Japan, like a benign educational plague. It is the future-and it is not before time. In Lifelong Learning, written 12 years ago, Longworth and Davies suggested eight reasons why lifelong learning is particularly appropriate for this age. But nine years is a long time in a lifelong learning world. While some are still as relevant as on the day they were written, it is time to update the rest to take into account the changes in the meanwhile: Fundamental global demographics-in the rich developed world, ageing, more mobile, more multicultural and multi-ethnic societies which could release high inter-racial and inter-generational social tensions and a reduced investment in welfare programmes through a fall in working, and an increase in retired, populations. By contrast, in the poorer parts of the world a massive population growth exacerbating already chronic shortages of resource and education and condemning vast numbers of people to live at subsistence level and below unless ameliorative projects are initiated. To keep away from the worst effects of both these scenarios, a high emphasis will need to be put on basic lifelong learning principles and a use of the new progress and delivery technologies (Longworth, 2003, p. 213). The pervasive influence of television and the media on the development of peoples' thoughts, ideas and perceptions. Television has an enormously powerful effect on people. Where it is in the hands of those who would use it as an instrument of propaganda, whether raw or subtle, as happens in both poor and rich countries, it can be used to foster hatred and intolerance. Where it is used purely as an instrument of entertainment, it can, through trivialization and ignorance of real issues, have an equally insidious effect on the ability of people to make informed choices. As an occasional, independent, instrument of education it could be used to transform nations into dynamic, well-educated and flexible lifelong learning societies (Marsick, 1998, p. 119). Environmental imperatives - the depletion of the world's resources and the need for renewable energy, the destruction of ecosystems and the demand for sustainable development. There is a crucial need to educate continually all the world's people in environmental matters as a basis for the survival of species on earth and to be inventive and innovative about how environmental information is kept constantly in the forefront of popular consciousness. In other words, the need for a lifelong learning approach to a lifelong survival issue (Swedburg & Ostiguy 1998, p. 27). These are issues affecting every society and they propagate a view of lifelong learning as a global phenomenon, entirely consonant with the reality of governmental perceptions. The efforts of international governmental agencies have offered some hope that it may be used to improve the lot of the developed and developing world alike, even though responses and actions will be very different. Other issues, mainly affecting the advanced industrial nations, include: New developments in all branches of science and technology, on the one hand offering a variety of new opportunities for organizational and personal growth and on the other stimulating a questioning of basic values. Both of these have important implications for lifelong learning. At one level, science and technology have helped to improve material standards of living in many parts of the world. Their spread into other communities, other societies, other countries in the developing world will help achieve growth and improve health and education, though there are fundamental environmental implications that need to be addressed in so doing. It augurs a massive increase in learning in order to understand and use technology wisely. The explosion of information and knowledge through the use of the Internet and communications technology. This has multiplied manifold the data and knowledge available to us and changed our way of living, working and communicating. Moreover, the speed at which these changes have taken place has surpassed the ability of many people to cope with no trouble with it. The wealth of information and the technology of handling it have made possible greater personal decision making, and, paradoxically, through its sheer volume reduced the likelihood of this being informed and balanced. Technology can empower or enslave, and learning is the key to its benevolent use. The need for both industry and people to remain innovative and flexible in order to retain high employment-the migration of work in the advanced nations towards high-skill, high-technology, high-added-value service industries. This renders much semi-skilled and unskilled work obsolete, increases the need for lifelong education and training to a high standard in all sections of the population and promotes the development of innovative work-related programmes to offset potential social unrest. Increasing individualization and the breakdown in parts of Western society of religious and family structures which traditionally have provided meaning and fulfillment to most people. More focus on personal development in order to realize and release creative human potential leads to the need for the further development of educational structures based on understanding, tolerance and contribution to the community (Wielkiewicz, 2005, p. 31). It is perhaps the last of these that focused minds and mindsets on lifelong learning at the time. The 'triumph of the individual' was one of the key ideas behind Naisbitt's ten 'Megatrends', first published in the 1980s and repeated for the 90s. It was a document to be found on the tables of many industrial leaders. But since that time raw individualism has become less fashionable. 'There is no solitary learning: we can only create our worlds together', say Rogers (2002, p. 103). 'The unfolding capability of the self always grows out of interaction with others. It is inescapably a social interaction.' And they are right. While the onus is still, and always will be, on the individual to decide on his/her learning, there has come to be a realization that other people and other organizations may have a key part to play too. The watchword for today is 'community' in every meaning of that word, whether it is a geographical entity as in a learning city or a learning region, or a community of people with a common sense of purpose or interest, as in a religious or a tribal community (Terry, 2001, p. 70). For Mckinley et al. (2001, p. 68), for example, the notion of a learning environment is much more than providing the tools to enable people to learn. 'For learning communities to emerge and evolve, ' he says, 'and for members of a learning community to participate in a flexible manner and to move between them, we need to conceive of more holistic concepts in which such restricted learning environments are only a part.' They set individuals into an integrated learning environment which includes the whole gamut of political, social, psychological, cultural, educational and environmental factors as both influences and resources from which they can draw. Whatever the scenario, it seems that cooperation is replacing competition in many walks of life. There was, of course, already activity before the 1980s. UNESCO's Faur Commission Report, published in 1972, was considered by many to be one of the most important educational reform documents of the second half of the 20th century. Among many other things it proposed: the development of human skills and abilities as the primary objective of education at all levels; support for situation-specific learning in the context of everyday life and work so that individuals could understand, and be given the competency, creativity and confidence to cope with the urgent tasks and changes arising throughout a lifetime; the creation of the sort of learning society in which independent learning is supported and provides an essential part of the continuum of learning as people move into, and out of, education during their lives; the involvement of the community in the learning process and the wider social role of education in understanding conflict, violence, peace, the environment and how to reconcile differences (for more detailed information see Evans, 2003, p. 34). Again we see an overall focus on individual responsibility for learning, albeit with a supportive role for the community. The concepts were further refined and developed in papers by Paul Lengrand and A J Cropley under the auspices of the UNESCO Institute of Education in Hamburg. In these, lifelong learning became a key concept for the survival of mankind, perhaps echoing Arthur C Clarke's dictum in Prelude to Space, 'Everyone will need to be educated to the level of semi-literacy of the average university graduate by the year 2000. This is the minimum survival level of the human race' (cited in Auger & Wideman 2000, p. 120) Science fiction writers often show remarkable percipience about the future of mankind but have a tendency to underestimate the time-scales. A similar theme was taken up by the Club of Rome report of 1979, 'No Limits to Learning'. In this seminal document, following its 'Limits to Growth' report which took the world by storm in 1973, a broad-based mobilization of the creative talent inherent in all human beings was considered to be the only way to allow them to understand, adapt to, and make progress in an increasingly complex world (Leuven & Tuijnman 1996, p. 10). The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), too, has long been a strong supporter of a lifelong learning approach, though initially under the name of 'recurrent education'. Its own landmark report 'Recurrent Education: A Strategy for Lifelong Learning. A Clarifying Report', produced in 1973, was well received by governments, higher education and NGOs alike. Recurrent Education concerned itself principally with post-compulsory and post-basic education and with preparation of the individual for a life of work. In practice, however, it acknowledged that work and learning are synergistic. Attitudes and values built up during the early learning process are important during the total life-span of an individual and have a profound effect on total human development, including learning for leisure, during retirement and within the community (Longworth, 2003, p. 60). Among OECD s recommendations at the time were: - the promotion of complementarity between school and adult education, with the emphasis on personal development and growth; - increasing the participation of adults in tertiary education by recognizing the value of work experience and 'opening up' the universities - extending the provision of formal adult education to a wider audience; - abolishing 'terminal stages' in the formal education system so that all programmes lead on to other programmes (cited ibid.). Here we see the first modern signs that learning is considered to be a holistic process in a holistic world. Complementarity and seamlessness may seem to be obviously desirable now, but in the fragmented and specialist world of the 1970s it was not evidently so. The transition from education to learning entails a much wider definition of the way in which people acquire and synthesize knowledge, and a consequent fusion of responsibility for educational provision from many sources, but we have a long way to go before the empires so carefully built up in a specialist world yield to the new imperative of connectedness (Dinmore, 1997 p. 452). In the more worldly Thatcher and Reagan-dominated Western world of the 1980s lifelong learning thinking became less fashionable, though there were pockets of activity in Europe and the Far East, much of it based on the need to train, retrain and renew in industry. At the same time in Europe in the middle 1980s the Industrial Advisory Committee to the European Commission made the comment: 'The information revolution is rendering much previous education and training obsolete, or simply irrelevant. Intellectual capital is depreciating at 7% per year which is a much higher rate than the recruitment of new graduates. On these grounds alone it is necessary for industry to develop and adopt systems of continuing education and training to update existing staff' (cited in Chappell, 2003, p. 209). And still this was not enough. Two years later the Council of European Rectors and the European Round Table of Industrialists complained that: 'Although the systems and standards of training and education in Europe are evolving to meet pressures on them, the changes are not wide, deep or fast enough to keep up with the pace of change in knowledge and technology' (Leuven& Tuijnman, 1997, p. 92). But it was in the 1990s that the major thrust for lifelong learning took place. The renaissance was again led by UNESCO and OECD, though other international governmental organizations such as the European Commission and the Council of Europe will also want to claim some credit, as well as some of the innovative initiatives in Japan and Australia. The UNESCO-sponsored Delors report on Education for the 21st Century was published only months after the 1996 OECD ministerial conference on lifelong learning. The four pillars of 'The Treasure Within'-'Learning to do, learning to be, learning to understand and learning to live together'-put the needs and demands of the individual once more at the centre of this quadrumvirate as the focus of educational activity. ' Lifelong Learning for All', OECD's flagship justification for lifelong learning, resulted from the 1996 conference of Ministers and provoked a great deal of national governmental activity in this area. For example, from 1998, the UK produced Green and White Papers on the subject as well as a flurry of recommendations, initiatives, reports and exhortations. Finland has produced its national lifelong learning strategy, the appropriately named 'The Joy of Learning', and other countries, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland and Denmark among them, have also produced similar national plans (Burns 2002). Meanwhile, the European Commission was declaring 1996 to be the 'European Year of Lifelong Learning' and preparing a White Paper on the subject, closely pursued by the European Round Table of Industrialists which collaborated with the Council of University Rectors to produce its definition of 'the learning society'. In the same year, Longworth and Davies published their book Lifelong Learning, spelling out its implications for schools, universities, business and industry, teacher training and the community at large (Kachingwe, 1999, p. 37). Since that time the number of words, actions and plans has seemed to reproduce geometrically. The EU Lisbon Summit in March 2000 produced for Europe the strategic target of 'becoming the most competitive economy in the world capable of sustainable growth, with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, through the development and promotion of a comprehensive lifelong learning strategy'. As a result the Commission organized a number of policy input seminars, the results of which were published in a 'Memorandum on Lifelong Learning for Active Citizenship in a Europe of Knowledge' in December 2000. It boldly states: Lifelong learning is no longer only one feature of education and training; it must become the main principle for provision and contribution across the full range of learning contexts. The impending decade must see the fulfillment of this vision. All those living in Europe, without exemption, should have identical possibilities to regulate to the demands of social and economic change and to take part actively in the shaping of Europe's future (cited in Lang & Wittig-Berman, 2000, p. 37). The memorandum went on to recommend five community-related objectives which are broadly paraphrased as: - "to provide lifelong learning opportunities as close to learners as possible, in their own communities and supported through ICT-based facilities wherever appropriate; - to build an inclusive society which offers equal opportunities for access to quality learning throughout life to all people, and in which education and training provision is based first and foremost on the needs and demands of individuals; - to adjust the ways in which education and training are provided, and how paid working life is organized, so that people can participate in learning throughout their lives and can plan for themselves how they combine learning, working and family life; - to achieve higher overall levels of education and qualification in all sectors, to ensure high-quality provision of education and training, and at the same time to ensure that people's knowledge and skills match the changing demands of jobs and occupations, workplace organization and working methods; - to encourage and equip people to participate more actively once more in all spheres of modern public life, especially in social and political life at all levels of the community, including at European level "(Reeve et al., 2002, p. 110). High ideals like this, carried over into the Commission's definitive policy paper 'Realizing a Europe of Lifelong Learning', both mirror and update the recommendations of the Faur Commission some 30 years earlier. Such a potted history cannot possibly do justice to the many people and organizations which have contributed to the lifelong learning debate over the past 30 years. However, even in a new millennium, and despite this plethora of animated vigor and the unanswerable case for lifelong learning, the debate still lies largely in the hands of academic educationists and politicians. The message that lifelong is 'lifelong' (from cradle to grave), that learning is 'learning' (and learner-focused), and that it is for everybody has not yet reached the vast majority of people targeted as the new generation of learners. Even for the vast majority of teachers in schools, lifelong learning is as remote a concept as was the idea of universal education to 18th-century society (Swallow, 1990, p. 13). And yet the case is undeniable. The convergence of information, communication and broadcasting technologies into what has become known as the knowledge society is one of the major determinants of the need for lifelong learning. In Europe the European Commission is investing some billions of euros in opening it up-it is, rightly, perceived to be crucial to the economic future of nations, of regions, of cities. In North America its equivalent-the 'Smart Cities' movement-pours vast amounts of technology into every aspect of its major cities -so that citizens can receive education, entertainment, shopping, banking services through computers at home. Effective use of the technology itself is also a large part of the answer. But, after years of rapid development, there is coming to be a realization that this alone cannot solve problems of human development. There needs to be an equivalent movement towards a 'learning society' - that is, in the words of the European Round Table of Industrialists, 'a society in which everyone is empowered and enabled to develop his or her own human potential'. Without it, vast numbers of people can become alienated from a fast-changing technological society. The European Council of University Rectors agrees. The indiscriminate use of technology does not always liberate. In their excellent booklet -'Creating the Learning Society'-they suggest that 'The Information Society must be completed and matched by a Learning Society, if we do not want to fall into an over-informed world and a valueless culture based on "zapping" and a "patchwork" superficiality' (cited in Thompson & Serra, 2005, p. 693). And they are right. It isn't just academic doom mongering. Sound-bite television already exists in many advanced countries anxious to spare their audiences the in-depth analysis which would cut into the entertainment schedules. It won't create informed citizens with 21st-century skills- learning how to learn, how to make critical judgements, how to tell the difference between good, bad and indifferent, how to communicate intelligently, to be flexible, adaptable and tolerant to other creeds and cultures, and to make a contribution to their city and to the well-being of others. And so we come back to lifelong learning. But what does it mean Any phrase which has become so overused is inevitably accused of being amorphous, vague, meaningless, intangible, motherhood, apple pie-all things to all people. And so it is, until we can find a definition which leads to action. So let us start with the words themselves. Lifelong learning is what it says it is: It is 'lifelong'. As Jan Comenius said, it is from 'cradle to grave' (Watson, 1998, p. 50). It is not simply relevant to the adult part of our lives, and not only related to continuous professional development or the acquisition of skills and competencies for the workplace, though governments inevitably put the emphasis on the economic advantage to be gained by the fact of more people learning. There is much more to it than that. Between the ages of 0 and 5 we learn to perform the most wonderfully complicated tasks with no formal education whatsoever. Communicating our needs, speaking, imagining, learning to read, to enumerate, sometimes even to write-they represent a major intellectual achievement which almost everyone masters. Research also tends to show that those senior citizens who stay learning and keep their minds lively are less likely to suffer from debilitating diseases like Alzheimer's and senile dementia. It is also 'learning' and that is one of the most important, and most misunderstood, words in the lexicon. It means doing things in a different way, creating an out-and-out focus on the needs and demands of the learner; giving learners the tools and techniques with which they can learn according to their own learning styles and needs. It is not teaching, not training, and not even education in its narrow didactic sense. It has a much wider scope. It has a social, economic, political, personal, cultural and, of course, educational meaning in its widest sense. Learning means giving ownership of learning to the learner him or herself and not to the teacher-a 180-degree shift of emphasis and power from provider to receiver. It moves teaching from the concept of 'the sage on the stage' to the idea of 'the guide at the side'. And it means using the tools and techniques which hopefully switch people back into the learning habit-personal learning plans, learning audits, creative learning partnerships, mentoring, electronic networks and the information and communications technologies in general. 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