Embracing a culture of lifelong learning: A personal perspective by Peter Kearns

The excellent paper by the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) Embracing a culture of lifelong learning (featured below and attached}, written as a contribution to the UNESCO Futures of Education initiative, merits widespread discussion. The paper combines vision and practical suggestions required in “reimagining knowledge, education, and learning in a world of increasing complexity, uncertainty, and depravity”.

I am particularly interested in the subject of the paper from my attempts to address the subject of building a learning culture back to 2000 when I wrote a paper, with George Papadopoulos (ex OECD), on Building a learning and training culture: the experience of five OECD countries. The countries examined were Sweden, USA, UK, Germany, and the Netherlands. Our conclusions led to our identifying three approaches from the countries examined.

• The Nordic model as in Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries.
• The British model (in the era of the Blair reforming government) where a revolutionary attempt was being made to change the culture and build a learning society.
• The American model which was market driven with much diversity and inequality.

The Nordic model where development of a learning culture through evolutionary stages is deeply embedded in the wider social, economic, cultural, and political history of the country was seen as attractive, but with doubts as to whether it fitted the Australian context. Recent surveys have shown these countries heading the World Happiness Reports as the happiest countries so that the culture developed over time is associated with such things as happiness and well-being in the community.

Some things that we drew from the 2000 study included the following.

• The importance of contextual influences on policy.
• The key role of values, e.g. egalitarian values in the Nordic countries.
• The pivotal role of policies to build partnership and mutual obligations.
• The key role of intermediary bodies.
• Blurring the economic and social divide.
• The “two cultures” phenomenon-learners and non-learners.
• The key role of technology.

Reading the analysis of the paper, and having regard to recent PASCAL International Observatory work, including the 2020 EcCoWell Community Recovery Program, the aspects of the UIL paper that interested me most were the following:

• The holistic vision of learning throughout life (p21);
• The need to rethink lifelong learning beyond the conceptual boundaries of educ.-22;
• The shift from supply to demand in policy (p.21); and
• The significance of local learning initiatives including learning cities with recognition of the value of “bottom up” changes towards a culture of lifelong learning (p31).

The cumulative interaction of these principles provided for me the core of a strategy towards building a sustainable learning culture, with some interesting links based on insights gained from our 2000 study of policies in five OECD countries to build a learning culture.

Some of those insights gained in the 2000 study appeared in various forms in the 2020 PASCAL EcCoWell Community Recovery Program, including in the reports from participants.

• The holistic vision that is the core of the PASCAL EcCoWell approach;
• The need to rethink lifelong learning for the emerging technology-driven longevity society;
• The importance of local neighbourhoods, as local regenerative communities, in an imaginative “bottom up” approach to building a learning culture with strengthened social cohesion;
• The value of local community institutions (centres, colleges, etc) as drivers of cultural change;
• Harnessing technology for human purposes;
• Steps towards a broadened approach to partnership (including “a new model of partnership with empathy”, Torres-Gomez,2020); and
• The power of transformative learning that enables the individual to re-create oneself in a world of permanent transition.

The next stage of development for PASCAL is merging these insights into coherent strategies that we have termed EcCoWell 3, as a path towards building and embracing a culture of lifelong learning. While this requires much discussion including the following aspects:

• Harnessing technology in local, regional, and international networks.
• Ensuring everyone, particularly seniors, is digitally literate.
• Building on insights gained from pilot learning neighbourhoods, and testing how far a “bottom up” approach can take us.
• Empowering the leadership role of local institutions such as community centres and colleges, museums, galleries and libraries.
• Connecting local networks to regional and international networks as frameworks for creative ideas.

The important role of local community institutions was a key insight from the 2018 PASCAL report on inclusion for ageing populations (Kearns, P. & Reghenzani-Kearns, D. 2018). These institutions included kominkan in Japan, volkshochschulen in Germany, Neighbourhood Houses in Australia, and U3A type institutions in many countries. Coalitions of such institutions could be very powerful, including in regions.

The path from local learning communities as a “bottom up” approach leads in the direction of what Makino (2020) has called “small societies” with a shift in the concept of learning.

            “Learning” is reinventing oneself in a life of meaning and purpose (Makino, 2020:19)

Overall, the key message from the 2020 EcCoWell Community Recovery Program is conveyed in the title: Connecting up in a world of turbulent change. This theme has considerable relevance to the analysis of the UIL paper prepared for the UNESCO Futures of Education initiative, and to building innovative learning ecosystems that are both social and biological.  This process will require building connections between many forms of education and learning, civil society, holistic economic and social development, cultural activities, and the changing patterns of life and work in the emerging technology-driven longevity society.

The UIL paper Embracing a culture of lifelong learning provides a timely map of things that need to be addressed in revitalising the role of learning throughout life in the process of building a sustainable learning society. It is likely to foreshadow important themes in the report of the UNESCO International Commission on Education Futures due at the end of this year. Perhaps PASCAL can make a small contribution in finding some practical ways to take these ideas forward.

I have added a short list of sources I have drawn on in this paper.

Some references

Gratton, L. & Scott, A. 2017. The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity. London: Bloomsbury.

Kearns, P. & Papadopoulos, G. 2000. Building a Learning and Training Culture: The Experience of Five OECD Countries. Available at: https://www.ncver.edu.au/research-and-statistics/publications/all-publications/building-a-learning-and-training-culture-the-experience-of-five-oecd-countries.

Kearns, P. & Reghenzani-Kearns, D. 2018. Towards Good Active Ageing for All. Available at: https://ala.asn.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/SIG-LLL-PIMA20ALA.pdf.

Kearns, P. & Reghenzani-Kearns, D. Eds.  2020. Connecting up in a World of Turbulent Change. Available at: http://lcn.pascalobservatory.org/sites/default/files/connecting_up_in_a_world_of_turbulent_changenov2020.pdf.

Makino, A. 2020. Inventing the New Concept of “Learning” for the Era of the 100-Year Life in Japan. Available at: http://cradall.org/workingpapers/inventing-new-concept-%E2%80%9Clearning%E2%80%9D-era-100-year-life-japan-creating-society-comprising-0.

Torres-Gomez, J. 2020. “Wyndham Learning City”. In Kearns, P. & Reghenzani-Kearns, D. Eds. Connecting Up in a World of Turbulent Change, pp.20-25. Available at: http://lcn.pascalobservatory.org/sites/default/files/connecting_up_in_a_world_of_turbulent_changenov2020.pdf.

UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning 2020. Embracing a Culture of Lifelong Learning: Contribution to the Futures of Education Initiative. Available at: https://unescodoc.unesco.org/ark:48223/pf0000374112.