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Plenary Speeches
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Theme 1 |
Theme 2 |
Theme 3 |
Theme 4
Active citizenship and social inclusion are key factors in sustaining democracy within the unfolding global context. The mutual interdependence between democracy and active citizenship is not only about participation and social inclusion through referendums, polls and elections. Democracy builds on real participation and engagement in the daily life by all individual citizens. Active citizenship means that the individual takes part in a society where he or she reflects the constructive role of the state and its institutions and in so doing has some awareness of the individual's responsibilities as well as rights within that state. Social inclusion means that the state and its institutions, on the other hand, should find a place for all in the very same society. Every single human being should be considered as worth something in the society and therefore nobody must be left out. However, the state and its institutions cannot force people to participate. Participation come from the individual's freewill. It should be noted that, however, in contract relations between the different institutions and the individual there is always a chance that the system undermines the individual by making them passive clients and dependent. We witnessed this in the Danish labour market policy five years ago. Handing money to people and then leaving them to themselves is not a sensible way forward. In the western welfare systems, it is often the case that the way we help people does precisely the opposite. Helping and assisting the individual without an agreement of some kind of payback to the society can make citizens passive and dependent. Eventually the citizen loses hope and self confidence and he or she will sit back and wait for institutions to take the initiative, or they will get angry and make uninformed choices as we have seen in the way that some groups protest in different parts of Europe today. The traditional educational and learning institutions and, in particular, the Western welfare systems should therefore assume a crucial role in promoting active citizenship in the global context. This is particularly important when considering the disadvantaged and marginalised members of our societies: the refugees, immigrants, unemployed, disabled and so on. Access to awareness and opportunities to make informed choice must be made available. The learning institutions are, in this context, facing the crucial challenge of guiding and inviting these groups to express their own learning needs and then make the formal step to become learners. Question of Participation So the question is how to apply learning aid to people in order to bring about their active participation in society through their informed choice? A second question is how to ensure adult learning contributes to the creation of high participation and performance in a democratic society? We must look at the relationship between individuals and the state and its institutions, particularly the learning institutions. We must look at new forms of institutional development that encourage participation. We will probably see the development of the demand-driven society that overwhelms supply-led education and training. In this context the learning institutions must stimulate and respond to demand and adapt provision according to demand instead of being supply-lead. This is a revolution within our educational systems. The role of the state in this context is to provide or secure the opportunities of learning. The state could provide each learner with a voucher instead of directing or allocating funding directly to institutions. Allocation of funding to the educational institutions would then come through the actual learner. The learners through their demand will then determine which institution or provider of learning will survive at the end of the day. If the institutions or the providers of learning do not match the needs of the learners then they will obviously close because there is literally no need for them. This voucher system links to very innovative English idea of developing learning accounts. Learning accounts is also placing the initiative and the responsibility for learning in the hands of the learner. Learning Boutiques Over the last two years with the learning boutiques for lifelong learning in Denmark and three other European countries, Iceland, Germany and France, we have tried to organise a new institutional form. In the learning boutiques, the citizen can choose and order the type of teaching, the methods and teachers they want, where the learning will take place, at what hours and the content. The learning boutique is right there in the street and it has a window display with tempting offers. The staff includes a guide, a 'tailor' and an entrepreneur. These three roles cannot be integrated in one person, but should be split up amongst others according to the size of the learning boutique. The guide helps the customer define their learning needs. A customer can be a single learner, a workplace, an organisation or a union. The guide and potential customer sit down together and start to negotiate because obviously the customer is not totally aware of what their needs and the kind of service they require from the boutique. The guide helps the customer express and then define what his or her real needs are. There is a difference between perceived needs and real needs especially concerning learning. As this point the tailor comes in and sews together a pattern and makes an offer to the customer of a flexible patchwork of different learning activities. Then the entrepreneur is brought into the scene. The entrepreneur knows the educational and learning environment and learning network in this local community or in this city where this situation takes place, and he then negotiates for the customer with all the different suppliers. Today the modern demand for learning and education cannot be supplied by one institution. You must bring in a lot of different stakeholders or suppliers and you should negotiate with them in order to find out who is best at fulfilling particular demands. You then negotiate and start actually setting up the learning programme. Marketing What we have found out in our transnational project going through the different elements of setting up a learning boutique is that one has to work thoroughly on the issue of marketing, particularly window displays. We have to invite business schools to teach us in how to market learning products. In addition, the situation around the desk needs to be developed. How do you actually encourage potential learners, particularly weak or excluded learners, to begin to define their own needs? Usually they are not invited to mutual negotiations of what the system can best provide offer them. So new participatory methods within the learning system have to be developed. Staff development also must take place. These roles of the tailor, the guide and the entrepreneur must be developed within new institutional forms. The situation that happens around negotiating table of costing and pricing a learning product is very challenging. We also need to further address the issue of how to organise the network that actually is behind the learning boutique. How do you make the local providers of learning and education interested in setting up this type of shop? This idea of learning boutiques is now taking off in South Africa. A township near Cape Town with 1.2 million people, an illiteracy rate of 80% and an official unemployment rate of exactly the same, 80%, is taking part. The informal economy in the township is, however, huge. There are a number of different business areas: television repair, shoe repair, different manufacturers, different proprietors of services etc. We must help these people into the more formalised economy. Active citizenship has to be developed in South Africa in order to make their new democracy succeed. We are using this idea to set up a structure in the community. We invite the self-employed to meetings, to the boutiques and we set up communication structures in order to make them trust the system and the providers of learning. Their former experience of these institutions was not a friendly one. We link the world of learning with the world of work. Now I come to my final remarks. The core issue is making the contract. It is making the learner trust the provider. It is making the learner, the citizen, trust the institution. This will determine whether this experiment succeeds or not.
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