14. maj 2009

"You learn as long as you live." So goes an old Danish saying, which has now acquired new meaning.

It used to mean that you accumulated experiences throughout a lifetime and gathered them together into a whole. Now it has to do with the fact that society is changing faster than ever, requiring individuals to rejuvenate their skills and abilities continuously - as a person, as a citizen and as an employee.

As a person, you enter into new relations and encounter cultures that were not even heard of fifty years ago. As a citizen, you have to grapple with social issues people knew nothing about in earlier eras. As an employee, you have to meet requirements that were never imposed on workers just a few years ago.

It all has to do with globalization and the transition from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy. In my daily routine, I meet new people every day with cultural backgrounds different from the one I grew up in. In the larger community - society as a formal decision-making process - I am confronted by questions that cannot be answered from the horizon of experience that traditional society makes available. The modern knowledge company extols what Emile Durkheim called an organic community, i.e. a community supported by difference. Co-workers are connected to each other not because they are the same but because they are different and dependent to a high degree on division of labor and difference.

Behind this lies the development of the international community as a communication system, because, as another European sociologist, Niklas Luhmann, has said, we are in a society with anyone who is within our communicative reach. Morally, politically and occupationally, I am in a society with those I can reach communicatively. Morally, because the destinies of people in other parts of the world also affect me. Politically, because I am forced to take a position on other political systems and communities. Occupationally, because the firm in which I am employed collaborates and competes with other businesses throughout the world.

All this places new requirements on education.
First of all, the individual must acquire new knowledge throughout his or her life. This means that, even in grade school, people must not just acquire knowledge but acquire knowledge about how to acquire knowledge. You can't just learn – you have to learn how to learn. In other words, lifelong learning starts in the first grade. More than ever before, an appeal must be made to the individual's independent acquisition of knowledge both as a skill and as a cognitive openness. You have to learn to be curious, and you have to learn how to satisfy your curiosity. You can't just learn the right answers; you have to learn to pose good questions.

Second, this requires the overall educational system to mesh together structurally. In many countries, it is a problem that, in course of his or her education, the individual passes through many different educational structures, each characterized by its own culture: Primary school has one culture and one kind of teacher. Upper secondary schools have a different type of teacher. And when you reach higher education or continuing education, you encounter yet a third culture and a third type of teacher.

Third, it is important that the education system places the greatest possible emphasis on inclusion: In a knowledge economy, we cannot afford to exclude whole groups of students from the educational community or to rob them of the desire to continue their acquisition of knowledge throughout their lives.

Fourth, it is important to put the individual at the center of the lifelong learning process. Different studies must be driven by demand, because they must be able to meet the individual's need for further education in relation to individual demand.

Fifth and finally, all this does not only put pressure on the education system but also on society and the business world. Businesses must create conditions and frameworks to accommodate their employees' growing skills and competence, and they must exploit the potential their employees bring with them. We need intelligent, not stupid, workplaces and businesses that provide organizational learning along with individual learning for co-workers.

All this is the reason why we - here and throughout the world of education - do not talk about lifelong education but about: Lifelong Learning.

By Professor Lars Qvortrup
Dean of the Danish School of Education,
Aarhus University

 

By Professor Lars Qvortrup
Dean of the Danish School of Education,
Aarhus University