Greetings from the Chair

The year 2016 gives one pause. The attacks of January 2015 in Paris were directed against free speech and religious tolerance; they failed: Charlie Hebdo sales are up, and opinion polls show that overwhelmingly, the French have positive views of Muslims, Jews and Europe. The attacks of November 2015 in Paris and July 2016 in Nice however succeeded in destablising through fear: people changed their daily routines or vacation plans. The elections in the UK and US are more difficult to characterize because this time, in the West, fantasy defeated fact, emotion triumphed over reason. The populist campaigns within democracies against what the West stands for in the world – common humanity over tribal groups, peaceful compromise as against belligerence, ties across borders and not walls at the border, a future of hope and not of fear – have done incalculable damage.  The inequality which motivated many voters will only be aggravated by the policies that electorates have chosen.  In 1885 Theodore Roosevelt, writing about “American Ideals”, attacked individualism in the United States as out of control, undermining civic culture and the public interest.  Fifty years later, Walter Lippmann, in The Good Society,  blamed Victorian England for reducing liberalism to laissez-faire, what hard-line Brexiters want. As someone might Twitter, “what a shame.”

Like an old-fashioned liberal of the kind Lippmann championed, I still believe that education will lead to a respect for truth, the basis for justice. Education matters perhaps more than ever.  The PISA results released in December are heart-warming in one respect: people learn from their mistakes to question the way they have been working and living. Several of the top-ranked countries in PISA today struggled to overcome mediocrity but did so in less than a generation; they include Asian and European countries alike, flattening a hierarchy of civilizations and cultures. The results also show that several of the richest and biggest economies are failing to address both inequality in education, and quality of education. How can people cope with change and try to understand the world if they do not have the basic tools?

Let us hope that the PASCAL Learning Cities Networks (LCN) programme and its mpre than two dozen organizations and communities around the world can lift our ambition to do more. I hesitate to mention names in a list that can only be incomplete, but the patience and leadership of Peter Kearns, Rob Mark and Mike Osborne underpin the success of this programme on behalf of the many people engaged at the local level. Rob is promoting projects in the UK and New Zealand; Peter, Denise Reghenzani, Norman Longworth, Roberta Piazza and Katarzyna Borkowska spoke in a learning city conference recently in Taipei; Mike, Muir Houston and Lesley Doyle participated in the ASEM LLL Hub biennial conference in Copenhagen, and Mike spoke at the ASEF rectors conference in Prague.

Posting papers on the website is something we can all do: for example, I contributed an essay on freedom of movement as part of the BREXIT debate that was published in the “Herald”.  John Tibbitt has proposed editing some twenty policy briefs into an electronic book; I hope this can be produced next year.  In 2016, PASCAL’s first special interest group became very active, thanks to Ilpo Laitinen and his colleagues. PIMA, based in Australia but with a global membership to support PASCAL, is expected to set up a second SIG.  The Centres are active.  Marius Venter at the University of Johannesburg has built up political and academic ties focusing on local economic development. Lectures at NIU and projects at Tec carry the PASCAL badge. Pat Inman, supported by Liza Ireland, have taken initiatives to develop an analytical framework for regions. 

The 2016 Conference in Glasgow was our biggest, demonstrating that our agenda is attractive – indeed compelling – to many people who have not previously taken part in PASCAL. Let us be proud of PASCAL, and proud that our 2017 Conference, 16-18 October, will take place in South Africa, on a continent with huge potential for the 21^st century.

Many thanks to all those who have devoted their time, energy and talent to PASCAL in 2016; your example is an inspiration.