The Learning City: Dead as a Dodo?

Thank you Martin for your provocative yet necessary contribution. My feeling is that learning cities are not dead as Dodos, but rather in a phase of metamorphosis towards a new and broader incarnation. The challenge is to advance a conceptual and policxy evolution in line with the radical changes in the context and environment of cities.

It is,of course, paradoxical, as you note, that the need for lifelong learning and  visionary enterprise in cities has never been greater for the reasons you cite, while the high noon of learning cities in countries such as the UK appears to have waned. I would add to your list of big issues the rapidly growing urbanisation in countries such as China, India, and most of Africa.

I wonder, however, whether we are too Euro-centric in coming to judgments on whether learning cities are as dead as Dodo. A recent UNESCO International Forum on Conceptual Evolution and Policy Development in Lifelong Learning held in Shanghai in May 2010 provided diverse perspectives on lifelong learning and learning cities across a range of Asian and African coutries such as China and Korea where governments have taken a policy position in mandating lifelon learning. This may lead to a different development trajectory to the familiar European pathways where all too often conditions make for inertia and conservatism.

Hence, I see much value in fostering an active North/South dialogue on lifelong learning and learning cities in the new PASCAL International Exchanges (PIE) project. PIE is still at an early exploratory stage of development, and we are learning how to build an online international dialogue. I would very much welcome your contribution to issues raised in the PIE stimulus papers and other documents. For example, PIE Discussion Paper 1 on Building 21st Century Sustainable Learning Citiies offers some perspectives on sustainability that should be debated. PIE Discussion Paper 2 takes up the central question of making learning cities creative and innovative. I would welcome your comments on issues raised in these papers that may be of interest to you.

Man is a social animal as a recent bestselling book by David Brooks reminds us We need, then, to be creative in finding social and community solutions to the myriad of issues confronting cities, and share our ideas and experience across the world regardless of location. Global citizenship needs to complement local citizenship. I hope you will join us in the PIE dialogue in finding new ways to move responses forward in ways that balance a necessary "glocalisation" - a deep knowledge and concern for the individual community combined with a global understanding and citizenship.

Dear Steve and Jarl

I found your comments very interesting and pertinent. The notion of a Runaway World was well argued by Anthony Giddins in the 1999 Reith Lectures, and in a number of respects the trends identified by Giddins have accelarated since 1999. In looking for responses, as we must, it is worth considering some of the proposals Giddins brought forward. These centred around what he termed a deepening of democracy-democratising democracy which he saw requiring a strong civic culture. He rightly observed that markets cannot produce such a culture so that we must look carefully at how to promote the role of civil society, including the family and other non-economic institutions such as cultural institutions.

This of course links with the current Big Society debate in the UK and I suggest that PASCAL should invest intellectual resources to the question of how to strengthen the role of civil society and foster the values and culture that you both point to in your comments. This is very pertinent to the objectives of PIE, and I hope that you will both contribute to progressing the PIE dialogue in these directions. This intellectual underpinning is needed to give direction to the PIE agenda. Some effective grassroots initiatives with a democratic orientation, such as the Hume Global Learning Village, already exist within PIE. These can be built on as a process of democratising democracy and fostering long term sustainability.

Values and culture matter of course so that it is worth considering the observation by Daniel Patrick Moynihan: " The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself."  Did Moynihan get it right?

Dear Jarl,

I agree that governments (most especially in times of perceived austerity) appear unwilling to support such humanising endeavours. However, it is worth remembering that Land Grant universities in the US and Plate Glass 60s universities in the UK were founded at different times and contexts where our collective resources were much fewer than is the case today. I think that when someone like Price, from one of the largest and most prestigious institutions in the UK is prepared to back this agenda it is incumbent on all of us involved to continue to press even if the task appears Sisiphyllian.

Kindest

Jim

It would be very interesting to blind referee teaching and scholarship across the spectrum. Having taught in both types of institution I saw many examples of excellence in the small, 'more parochial' liberal arts university college in which I started in HE and many examples of errant stupidity in a large research intensive institution. Of course critical mass offers power and diversity and that is not to be sneezed at but it does require careful consideration as to whether critical mass on its own is any guarantor of quality. It seems to me that what is needed most and lacking most is a combination of wisdom and graciousness – the wisdom to chart a way forward and the graciousness to engage others in stepping out into the unknown.

Dear Steve,

While I assent to your claims about blurring we also need to take account of the complex historic purposes of universities (where blurring has always been part of our lives). Universities were often deeply utilitarian in preparing people for church ministry (in various guises) and civil service. In that sense there has always been something of the factory in them. The challenge, has always been that Universities are also the progeny of productive surpluses whether these are by the agrarian and trading surpluses of Alexandria or the residue surpluses of 19th and early 20th century industrialisation in late (post) industrial societies such as Britain and the US. As the surpluses reduce year on year and the balance of surplus shifts the traditional liberal model (itself a function of surplus in the Greek City State or London) comes under increasing strain. The task is to illustrate how the fruits of surplus actually enhance the lives of people in a way that recognises the twin imperatives of maintaining those surpluses that secure the future (through economic means)  and nurturing flourishing for all- something that has been 'abundantly absent on English Streets this week. It does seem to me, and I'm always open to correction, that the only way to do so is maintain the higher order entailments of complexity. To understand particular social, cultural, economic problems as enormously complex may offer something to understand the particular in its singularity. To teach folk to deal with the particular will never enable them to grasp the complexity. Lessons from literacy strategies are instructive here. We spend a lot of time getting students to be functionally literate and there they remain-functionally literate. However, were we to invest as much pedagogic/androgogic effort in getting them to engage with and love literature they will undoubtedly be functionally literate, but will also carry forward into their private and public lives a surplus of meaning and understanding.

Hope this isn't too convoluted.

Kindest Jim