Vox pop: How can lifelong learning change your country?
BEIJING, P.R. CHINA
Vice Minister Zhang Xinsheng, Ministry of Education
To the question 'Why is it urgent to discuss lifelong learning?' Mr. Zhang Xinsheng answers:
"First of all, globalization has taken place in most developing and developed countries. It makes the knowledge supply cross country boundaries and the production of skilled labor a shared responsibility of all nations. Global competitiveness replaces basic literacy as the foundation of individual development and economic growth. However, globalization must have a 'humane face', a consideration for the standard of living of the general public. Attention to social welfare and global competitiveness sets the stage for the development of a harmonious world where people learn throughout their lives."
Read more on pp. 8-11
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK
Director Arne Carlsen, International Affairs, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University
What is the defining issue for lifelong learning?
"Expanding education to an innovative, integrated system for formal, non-formal and informal learning."
How can lifelong learning change your country?
"By giving all people wider opportunities to be entrepreneurial and take responsibility for their future competence development in all areas and at all levels."
Read more on pp. 12-14
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA
Professor SoongHee Han, Department of Education, Seoul National University
What is the defining issue for lifelong learning?
"Higher Education Reform. More than ever, college and universities will take the central role of continuing education and training. It needs to be re-designed to adapt the returning learners and new way of qualification of the learning, contrasting with the traditional academic degree conferments."
How can lifelong learning change your country?
"It already began to change community education, establishment of the independent lifelong education law, learning city movement, and promotion of higher education institutions that focuses on the leading role of continuing and further education. It constantly changes the whole mindset of the Korean people to re-consider the concept of learning as flexible, frequent, easily accessible. The hesitation of the government to invest more infrastructure on community education and labor market training will face serious challenges with the increasing dominance of market-driven learning provision."
Read more on pp. 15-17
LONDON, GREAT BRITAIN
Professor Tom Schuller, Director of The Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning at The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE )
What is the defining issue for lifelong learning?
"To change the mindsets of policy-makers and the public at large, so that they genuinely look at education in a life course context. In the Inquiry which I direct, we are developing a 'four-stage' approach to the educational life course, which we think will generate a radically different way of thinking and planning, and getting a better balance of educational opportunity."
How can lifelong learning change your country?
"It can help individuals exercise more power and control over their own lives, and it can help people understand each other better, whatever their origins." Read more on pp. 18-21
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK
Associate Professor Richard Desjardins, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University
What is the defining issue for lifelong learning?
"The governance of lifelong learning systems! The concept of lifelong learning is central to advancing and reproducing culture, individual and collective identities, belief and value systems, social and power relations, knowledge, and it is at the heart of resource conversion processes. Lifelong learning systems if conceived as such is a corridor of communication that has the potential to link various spheres of life and subsystems of human activity. Our societies have not yet figured out how to link this into a coherent overarching system which has the necessary governance and communication structures in place for it to function as such. We have a long way to go - it is the Copernican revolution of the 21st century."
How can lifelong learning change your country?
"Lifelong learning is an essential feature of modernisation and is necessary for the continued democratisation of all social and cultural reproductive and transformative mechanisms in our societies. It can empower and liberate every citizen from the shackles of our own individual and collective histories, traditions and cultures. If implemented in a democratic context, it is the key to unlocking our ability as humans to synthesize socially created meanings into a overall code which can serve to converge resources toward shared goals and aspirations."
Read more on pp. 18-21
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
Professor Richard Vaughan Teese, Director of Centre for Postcompulsory Education and Lifelong Learning (CPEL), Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne
What is the defining issue for lifelong learning?
"That all people have access and that all derive quality benefits from lifelong learning."
How can lifelong learning change your country?
"By creating a second path that does not depend on graded, formal education, and which is inclusive rather than selective."
Read more on p. 22
TORONTO, CANADA
Professor David Livingstone, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
What is the defining issue for lifelong learning?
"For me, the central issue is whether adult learning will be understood inclusively of unpaid as well as paid activities and in relation to both its capacity to enrich our lives and its limitations to solve inherently economic and ecological problems."
How can lifelong learning change your country?
"Formal education is inherently valuable and every country should offer opportunities for all people to achieve their educational potential. But a wider and deeper appreciation by policy makers and the general public of the rich and extensive formal and informal knowledge already achieved, as well as the extent of the waste of this talent in jobs beneath the capacities of the available labour force, could encourage greater attention and initiatives to address directly the economic and ecological problems that are at root of the crisis of global sustainability. Greater public investment in formal education and financial bailouts of economic organizations as currently structured will not resolve this crisis."
Read more on pp. 23-25
LONDON, GREAT BRITAIN
Professor Karen Evans, Institute of Education, University of London
What is the defining issue for lifelong learning?
"Re-establishing the relationship between education and 'real life' will mean broadening public appreciation of what is genuinely educative in people's lives, as conceptions of worthwhile learning break free of narrow institutionalised confines."
How can lifelong learning change your country?
"Bringing politics closer to the life worlds and aspirations of ordinary people will mean seeking solutions based on broader and fairer forms of meritocracy and bringing work and the pursuit of broader social purposes into a better balance at all levels of the social world. Lifelong learning holds the key to these changes."
Read more on pp. 26-29
LONDON, GREAT BRITAIN
Dr. Edmund Waite, Institute of Education, University of London
What is the defining issue for lifelong learning?
"The need to ensure that lifelong learning fosters social justice and inclusion as well as economic competitiveness."
How can lifelong learning change your country?
"By enabling and providing more accessible and flexible patterns of learning that allow for the fulfilment of the above goals."
Read more on pp. 26-29
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK
Professor Lars Qvortrup, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University
What is the defining issue for lifelong learning?
"We must learn to learn, not learn to know."
How can lifelong learning change your country?
"By educating people that demand intelligent workplaces."