Lifelong Learning (LLL): does the term still give good service?

Meetings on successive days at the European Centre EUC of RMIT University in Melbourne, the Asian-Australian Centre for PASCAL, addressed in turn the needs and circumstance of Seniors, and then of Young People. They followed hard on the heels of the founding AGM of the Pascal Friends’ Association PIMA whose currently 58 members will it is hoped add their ideas and experiences to a strengthening dialogue on critical issues using OTB.

One of a series convened by Peter Kearns and Mike Osborne, a day-long Seminar was held on Seniors as Lifelong Learners: barriers, strategies and outcomes on Monday 30 November in the Inclusion Network within the Learning Cities series. Denise Kearns will report on this Website.

That Seminar was followed by a two-day Conference of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Lifelong Learning Hub headquartered in Copenhagen and chaired by Klaus Hub, as part of its Research Network 4 (RN4) programme of activities.  RN4 is co-convened by Glasgow and PASCAL Centre Head Mike Osborne. It concerns national strategies for Lifelong Learning; this meeting examined and compared Asian and European policies and practices for engaging young people in lifelong learning.

The juxtaposition allowed significant common membership. Unsurprisingly, common and generic themes emerged of interest to PASCAL and this OTB facility, and might fruitfully be taken further here. This short reflective note partly reflects what I said in a verbal Seniors’ Seminar Summing Up but has no official status. It was and is intended to provoke dialogue.

Thirty high animated Seniors’ discussants looked at issues and current good practice with an inspirational tale of three greater Melbourne city case studies, then asked what was missing and, less decisively, where to go from here. Libraries came out well, as well supported and adapted learning spaces. So did intergenerational learning. There was anxiety about shrunken meaning for LLL. It was asserted that it was for ourselves, for the economy, for the society and for the heritage (the French patrimoine). All were of innate value, not to be valued just in economic terms and measured fiscally. Big data are essential – but for counting what and for whom?

Each of the key elements of discourse was a frisky chameleon: seniors are mature age, older, retired, or pensioners, third- and maybe fourth-agers, sometimes only 50+, or 60+, branded in ten-year cohorts. 65-70 versus older. The same went for education, training, learning discourse; and the next day for young people or youth, even for employment.

Governance by the community, networking, whole-of-Council collaboration? – all applauded, all hard to achieve. ‘Social capitals, with an s, learning places, problematic but also essential social media, joined intergenerational learning. Good stories need telling – and retelling Some tried to steer clear of ‘the political’; but everything was, and there was also virtue in being (politically) angry. My own public conclusion was that we had to get our thoughts clear and with it our language; hoe else can we identify and work together for what we value and believe in? So we must redeem ‘learning’, and disentangle it from education, and training, so we can champion each in modes at once political, diverse and convivial

The much larger international ASEM Research Hub gathering the following days left me still more challenged to take up something that has been visited but not to my knowledge fully confronted and worked through: the use and the efficacy in this century of the deeply valued later 20^th century term lifelong learning, and its offspring of learning regions, cities, neighbourhoods and communities - as well as lifelong learners themselves. In 2012 Britain’s Martin Yarnit wrote clearly and provocatively about the ineffectual character of LLL as a term to persuade: regional and local authorities in their practice seemed to be doing much that LLL preached but without use or awareness of the term. (See M Yarnit, Whatever became of the learning city? in Cities Learning Together: Conference Precedings RMIT EUC 2013)

My own unresolved puzzle around the Lifelong Learning concept as now employed and often abused was piqued by the energetic Seniors day’s work by committed practitioners; and further piqued by reading immediately after, the new and for us important UNESCO education report. Duly slimmed down as befits an age of austerity, Rethinking Education. Towards a global common good? Follows in the visionary vein of the Faure (1972) and Delors (1996) reports. I will take that further separately on OTB later.