Hot Topics

This Hot Topic paper returns to a central theme for PASCAL, which is the development and implementation of lifelong learning.    Unlike earlier HTs on the theme, Jarl Bengtsson is concerned less with the concept of lifelong learning but much more with those factors at national level which need to be addressed if substantial progress is to be made in making a reality of the widespread policy commitments which are in place in most EU countries and amongst OECD member countries around the world.

A rapid response in the provision of high quality education at all levels is urgently required of educational communities and governments. Hence, universal primary education has been registered as a top priority on the agenda of the international community in the modern era. To this effect the United Nation’s goal is to ensure that by 2015 all children, particularly girls, children in difficult circumstances and those belonging to ethnic minorities, have access to and complete free and compulsory primary education of good quality (Unesco, 2000).

The starting point of all thinking about the past and our relation to the past must be that it is irreversible. This sounds almost ridiculously self-evident. Nevertheless it is exactly this fundamental characteristic which is creating the problems as well as the possibilities in the use of history. 

This Hot Topic paper, Language, Place and Learning, addresses issues associated with language, place and learning. The starting point for Lo Bianco's analysis, the claim that we can anticipate that half of the world's population will soon speak some form of English, is a provocative starting point. He proceeds to outline the role of the Americans in this process, and the way in which the English language has been implicit in the economic, political and cultural imperialism of the United States over the last two hundred years.