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Plenary Speeches
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Speaking in German My topic is the new approach to lifelong learning for all. It is quite obvious that at this moment in time we are at a critical phase of transformation, where familiar systems, familiar structures, regulations, patterns of behaviour are increasingly losing their efficacy and their impact. The most serious symptom of this crisis is the impending exclusion of considerable groups of the population from the workforce and from the society of knowledge. As we find global and local struggles for our competitive advantage intensifying, we find equally that in this respect there are the following developments. There is firstly structural unemployment, which has caused many people to drop out of central societal groups where they would otherwise be well socialised and have general recognition. Secondly there is a form of further education which particularly, in conjunction with the use of new technologies means that the gap between those who are included and excluded, between the educational winners and the modernisation losers, would tend to increase rather than be closed. In this sort of critical situation for the workforce and the society of knowledge, I think that new perspectives and new guidelines have to be developed for future ways of living together and for the future of human learning and further education. So in our particular context this poses us the question: what will be the function and importance of learning in future? And how can lifelong learning be developed in such a way that it does not then further increase the gap between those who know and those who have no knowledge, but helps rather to bridge this gap. Pace of Change First of all there is the fast pace of social, industrial and technical change. Then there is the continuing change in the requirements for work and vocational skills and the speedy obsolescence of knowledge, which, taken together, make it inevitable that we will have to comply with lifelong learning even as adults. Secondly, there is the increasing measure of globalisation, pluralisation, individualisation and flexibilisation of the worlds of living, working and learning. These make it necessary for us to have more decentralised independent forms of control and responsibility, in production, in services and in our general way of living, even on the lower levels, which again makes it necessary to have lifelong learning for all. Thirdly, in order to facilitate a peaceful, judicious and democratic resolution of new problems in an open future, previously uncultivated skill potentials in our citizens have to be developed in a broader fashion. This means including personal and social key skills and creative innovative skills. As you know, in January 1996 in Paris, the Ministers of Education of the OECD, drew the conclusion from this, that it was necessary to make lifelong learning for all the target of their future education policies. But how is it practical for us to put the extensive requirements of lifelong learning for all into real practice? It is obvious that it is not possible to organise lifelong learning for all as a rule in institutionalised teaching and learning establishments. Experience has shown that most adults are not able to be persuaded to get involved in organised institutions of further education. It would not be appropriate to have lifelong educational control of adults who have the necessary maturity for thinking their own thoughts and choosing their own way of learning. Informal Learning This informal lifelong learning for all, in their world of living, working and media, can give us clues as to the types of learning which are familiar to those people who we, from the point of view of educational establishments, would deem to be educationally disadvantaged. There are usually fashions or forms of learning which relate to a specific situation. That means that it is a more concentrated form of learning related to a particular occasion or to problem solving, dealing with practical requirements. This is more by way of being a casual way of learning. It is usually tied into other activities which will in fact hardly help us in many respects. This more natural form of learning does also require advice, consultation, support and so on, so that it can continue to develop itself into a more continuous cohesive and effective form of learning. In this respect, it is not a case of dragging these people who learn from their own situations into our courses of further education, and then trying to absorb educationally the learning that they have gained from their immediate lifestyle. What is more in demand is the provision of information and consultation opportunities, which can be accessed by the learners themselves, individually, whenever they come into an acute situation where they need to have help. This approach is based on the conviction that, in this critical phase of transformation, it is important to broaden the development potential of all people, not just those with educationally advantaged backgrounds and the so-called ruling classes. We can no longer afford to leave the greater part of the adult population up to their own devices. These are the people who are not involved in any organised form of further education so far. The lifelong learning approach can only become the popular sport that the Scandinavian Ministers of Education described it as some years ago, if it is made available to a broader section of the public and they become aware of it as a normal function of life. This function helps us again and again to process and understand new information, experiences and challenges, to evaluate and interpret these things and to include them into our concepts of how to change our behaviour, whilst making comparisons with other factors. This all leads on to a facility of coping better with our own lives, facilitating social participation and ensuring a good quality of and meaning to life. The greater the floods of information and the dumps of information that we have in our information age, the more important it becomes to have human learning as a selective structuring processing of relevant knowledge into regulated or problem-related knowledge. That means that the information age has to become an age of learning. Further or continuing education in the modern, broader sense also encompasses manifold efforts to include non-organised learning in authentic situations that we know from our life, from our place of work and from the media, but outside educational establishments. How then can this lifelong, informal, self-learning for all be supported in practical measures, so that it can become a consciously cohesive form of learning? I am sure it cannot be done by confining it to school. Because if you take it out of its directly motivating context, with authentic situations and real life, which challenge people to learn, it becomes uninteresting for most adults. Control The goal is not to have learning that you organise yourself; the goal is to have learning that you control yourself. Learners can choose the use of learning options and aids organised by others, but in accordance with their own needs. And of course you can accommodate increasingly high demands on this more open, strongly controlled situational learning, by transferring the didactic functions of professional teachers to the person who is doing his or her own learning. But I believe this means that we remain in the traditional educational scenario, where learning has to be consciously organised, right the way through from rational statements of need and interest, through scientifically derived teaching arrangements and learning arrangements, all the way through to professional evaluation. But this again means that we remain within a sphere of activity where most adults are not voluntarily prepared to get involved. I believe that the bottom line is quite simply that people are not going to let themselves be swept away by changing information, trends in opinion and learning packages. Rather, from what is initially often an intuitive emotional or associative reaction to various challenges, they will gradually gain clearer and clearer perceptions of their own standpoint and their own objectives. From that point on they can gradually start to take control of their learning processes by trial and error in a more targeted and reflected fashion. In fact, an open multi-facilitated learning service has much to recommend it, I believe, as the starting point for an appropriate support of informal lifelong learning, which is indeed something that most people already practice. By providing up-to-date information, by opening up contextual knowledge and providing learning materials, partners, expert aid, communication facilities and so on, this form of informal learning can be encouraged. In such a way, the citizens and people of our countries are more easily enabled to bridge the information gaps, to overcome problems of understanding and comprehension, to pursue these contextual requirements in a continuous fashion, to have a better understanding of their own prejudices and where they have gone wrong. They will gradually be able take control of their own ad hoc learning situation in a more conscious fashion and adjust it in accordance with their own needs, requirements and objectives. This would change the service functions for people which would mean that we should not have to offer specific learning courses. Instead, we should provide everything possible to help different ways of learning, prepare it, process it and make it accessible and interesting to people who want to learn. This is an open learning service which would, structurally speaking, develop somewhere between the modern libraries, media centres, learning agencies, museums and theatres on the one hand and the more school-like establishments for education on the other. But of course they can be tackled from both sides and all three forms of institutionalisation should be included in a more extensive network for lifelong learning. Modern Learning Service This sort of modern learning service centre should offer to encourage lifelong learning, with 24 hours a day support and round the clock help, with modern computer technology. The range of facilities should include orientation about the different options for learning, learning aids, media packages, consultancy services, meetings of learners. The centres also ought to provide facilities, information, learning partners, experts and equipment for learning. They ought to further provide subject-focused presentations of literature, documentation, speakers, artistic presentations relating to actual contexts. They ought to provide possibilities for people to meet and communicate with other people from different sorts of lifestyles, from other countries and cultures, speaking other languages and following other religions. They also ought to provoke an inducement for people to continue learning by confronting them with unsolved problems, with controversial positions, by setting up philosophical, artistic and political debates and subjects. I think that most people need these sort of incentives, challenges and props so that in their own lives they can be more aware of learning and can continue with it, so that, in this particular context, they are again able to control their informal learning in a more conscious fashion. But of course we do know that systematic learning puts off a lot of adults. Certainly in Germany, adults are less and less inclined to commit themselves to courses run by other people which will last for at least a semester. Most people do not even like to be guided by educationalists and be controlled directly or indirectly. Instead of moving into a group learning process, which is more or less run by outsiders, where the expert leads and a preset timetable and subject range has been laid down, more and more adults want to make their own selection and their own decisions as to which information and which type of interpretation aids they want to have, which they want to incorporate in their own sequence and intensity within the context of their own learning process. Motivation is of primary importance in lifelong learning and of course we want to encourage people to go on learning on their own initiative, from their own interest and from pleasure in having this learning and the success that comes with it. To do that with creative imagination, we have to then develop and try out new forms of presentation of knowledge. Learning Cafes I want to describe this sort of open learning centre. It is not just theoretical. We do have a few examples in practice of this in Germany. So first of all, we have what we call Learning Cafes. They are then targeted at someone else's culture or lifestyle, with typical food and drinks and including the speaking of the appropriate foreign language. You can only get in there if you can pass yourself off in English, you are going to order in English. Of course the learning cafes are run by native speakers. I think you also know about Internet Cafes, and there are other examples such as Media Centres. Media Centres have an inviting atmosphere, where the atmosphere is quite simply different and where you may be an individual learner, learning for yourself, or you can get involved with a group of learners, to listen to various presentations, gain global information which you can access this in different ways. If necessary then you can turn to the experts for advice or technical help. There are also learning studios. These are facilities and studies where we rely on different sorts of media and look at all different ways of solving problems but reduce it to one subject emphasis. So, if there is a problem then you set up a group where all people can have input for this problem from videos, from books, from their PCs and so on and they can access all these different sources. Or we also have what we call Research Stations, these are sites where text and other sources of information can be called up via the PC, keying in special key word combinations or whatever. We also have Performance Studios, where we have media presentations of multifarious new ways of learning, which provokes problem scenarios. You then present this on the basis of your own experience. You could act it out jointly. You can discuss it. It is then stored for other groups of learners and they can use it if they want. We also have artistic provision exhibition rooms and so on, where we can look at new directions, styles, topics, problems, authors and so on and your attention is drawn to these different aspects. We also have Reading Salons and rooms for study groups and for particular types of meetings where you might have what we would call a philosophical breakfast, or an evening to find out about Buddhism, or a learning exchange at the weekend, a future workshop for the PC and so on. In all these facilities, to facilitate and encourage more pronounced lifelong learning which is controlled by the individual, we should, as far as possible, also provide what we call 'hotline phones'. This gives everybody the opportunity, if they run into problems or have any understanding difficulties to phone somebody up immediately for help and advice. The whole point, the whole goal of these open learning service bases, is to generate attractive learning environments, where it is possible for the individual to orientate himself or herself, to gather more information, to see how they can go on developing and unfolding their knowledge, especially in an inviting atmosphere with open access. The idea is that people should realise that it is fun to learn, and that, by developing your own skills through learning, you can enrich your own life, you can improve your prospects in life and you can increase your quality of life. At the moment in Stuttgart, we are in the throes of developing a model for this sort of open learning consultation and learning support centre for all the residents of our city. This is not theory. We have of course got the most important thing lined up, that is the funds. We have got about 100m marks for this pilot project in the capital of Badenvortenburg and quite simply we want to run it through and try it out in practice. Of course the whole thing has to be looked at in context with what we have spoken of already, and this is this paradigm shift or change. The development of open service basis for the daily learning of all our citizens, is something which is in context with this paradigm shift. The attention in learning is moving away from learning as a reaction to organised instruction, towards more self control of learning in an environment which encourages people to learn. Multifarious Opportunities The scientific planning of a curriculum for larger units is receding into the background when compared with the development of multifarious types of learning opportunities. These can be selected by the learners in accordance with their individual requirements and then compiled accordingly. We find that the accents are shifting with our learning processes. We are moving away from the teacher/learner interaction towards an interaction between learners and problem areas. We are moving away from specific transmission of knowledge to the involvement of knowledge which is targeted to specific tasks and projects. We are moving away from memory based storing of information to the development of knowledge and skills which relate to actions. We are moving away from the purely verbal to the more situational and visual forms of learning. We are moving away from learning which is derived from this systematic approach of a science, to a learning where the context is derived by the learners from their contextual problems, questions and interests. The connection between learning now is less given by the systematic ordered systems which we have, and rather evolves from the contextual questions of learners. We will also find that the application and opening up of knowledge will also have to change. So I am talking about moving away from a regulated linear development of constructing, building up knowledge and acquiring knowledge. We will have to move from this towards a more flexible approach with open networks. So that means that we will have to offer the possibility for people to get involved at various nodal points, so that they can enter and exit at these points and they do not have to go through a very set pattern. So really we are looking at building-brick approaches in hyper structures. These can of course be facilitated with new electronic approaches and linkage. Of course this is a very wide-reaching field for the creativity of our future trainers and learners in the further education.
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