Session of the 21st Century Talks
Lifelong learning for all: how long to get there?
29 October 2008

Foresight

On 29 October 2008 took place at the UNESCO Headquarters a session of the 21st Century Talks organised in collaboration with the Education Sector within the framework of the First World Forum on Lifelong Learning. Open by the Director-General of UNESCO, Mr Koïchiro Matsuura, this session brought together three outstanding personalities, Jan Figel, Catherine Odora Hoppers and Jacques Attali, on the theme « Lifelong learning for all: how long to get there? ». Following their interventions, Khunying Kasama Varavarn and Nicholas Burnett, launched the debate.

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BIOGRAPHY OF THE SPEAKERS

• Ján Figel: European Commissioner in charge of Education, Training, Culture and Youth, he is a former member of the Slovakian parliament and also served as State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in charge of preparing Slovakia’s adhesion to the European Union.
  
  
• Jacques Attali: Professor, writer, economist, he was special advisor to the French President (1981-1990) and is now the chairperson of A&A;, an international consulting firm specializing in new technologies, and PlaNet Finance, an organization that brings together microfinance institutions from all over the world.
  
• Catherine Odora Hoppers: Professor and South African Research Chair in Development Education at the University of South Africa, she is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa and a former Visiting Professor at Stockholm University.



• Khunying Kasama Varavarn, is Secretary-General of the Office of Basic Education Commission at the Ministry of Education of Thailand. She is a former chairperson the Governing Board of the UNESCO Institute for Education – which was replaced by the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning.



• Nicholas Burnett, Former Director of the UNESCO’s Education For All Global Monitoring Report from 2004 to 2007, he is now UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education.

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SUMMARY OF THE SPEECHES:

In his opening address, the Director-General of UNESCO, Mr. Koïchiro Matsuura, recalled that training had become a central dimension to adult life and, because of increases in exchanges, of new forms of communications and knowledge, there is a need to constantly adapt and acquire new skills. He stressed that “The idea of learning itself must be reinvented, because life-long learning is not only an addition of initial schooling and continuing education: it becomes a comprehensive way to look at our relationship to work, time, knowledge and ourselves.”

Lifelong learning is neither only a technical nor educational question, asserted the Director-General, calling on the international community to meet the twin challenges of investment and inclusion. “We must continue to invest, correct subsisting gaps in funding by donors, and place aid amounts at the service of progress and the improvement of equity. The current financial crisis should not jeopardize these financial efforts, whether they are agreed investments by developing countries or that of development assistance and basic education provided by donors”, he declared

Then, addressing the issues of inclusive education, Mr. Matsuura emphasized the need for an education throughout life which benefitted all, beginning with marginalized, poor, and vulnerable populations. “This education”, he concluded, “must be accessible, affordable and of good quality. This is an essential requirement if we are to effectively improve equity of education systems to advance access and quality, while upholding the principles of participation and accountability.”

According to Mr Jacques Attali, one of the major revolutions that must be achieved was to ensure that education was regarded as being as important as health. Diseases were to be feared, and public authorities were making effective efforts to reduce them by employing wide-ranging financial and scientific resources. Yet, there was a failure to see clearly enough that ignorance was a disease which caused social and even physical death and which engendered barbarism and dictatorship. In short, health was a collective success while education was a collective failure.

Mr Attali drew three conclusions from those observations:

• because prevention was tantamount to a cure, it should be recognized that lifelong learning was a way of caring for oneself throughout life; just as there were various ways of caring for oneself, there were various forms of learning, and those should be recognized through the application of new methods for evaluating the knowledge acquired from experience;



• just as caring for oneself was regarded as being socially useful, it should be recognized that education did not simply benefit the individual learner but was a socially useful activity which should be available throughout life and which deserved remuneration;



• despite appearances to the contrary, there had not been any scientific or technological revolutions in the field of education since it was often regarded as sufficient to apply modern technology to traditional methods; in order for education to enter the industrial age, enormous investments in research, especially concerning the brain, were needed.

Mr Ján Figel, stressed the increasing importance of education within the European Union whose Lisbon Strategy was designed to transform it into a knowledge society. Those developments were in pursuit of an ideal of constructing a zone and an era of peace. The benefits of an effective education system were seen in the area of the economy, where performance became stronger, and of employment, where quality improved. However, the positive effects of an education system were also measured by its impact on community life, the creativity of cultures and greater openness to others and to the world.
The European Union had restructured is education programmes and made them part of a global lifelong education policy, the main lines of which were the following:

• international mobility of students and teachers;



• instituting a flexible and open system for the recognition of qualifications;



• improving the quality of education, through better adaptation to individual needs and a re-evaluation of the teaching profession;



• better interaction between the world of work and the world of education;



• emphasis on equity and the training of citizens to live in a pluralistic world;



• increasing creativity and innovation through education and training.

Ms Catherine Odora-Hoppers began her speech by observing that globalization led to inevitable closeness between individuals, societies and countries in physical, cultural, religious and political terms.

In that new environment, it was important to beware of two contradictory forces. The first made the world homogenous and imposed on it the culture of a few. The second broke cultures down into a myriad of claims challenging the universal and the rational – at times to justify any form of violence.

That contradiction could only be resolved by embracing an egalitarian world democracy which rejected the idea that one culture or body of knowledge, whether it be modern or traditional, written or oral, urban or rural, global or local, was superior to another.

To build the world on a foundation of tolerance, it was important to apply what Ms Odora-Hoppers termed cognitive justice, under which knowledge and skills that had been excluded for many years would be recognized as having the right to exist in all spheres of life. The key goal of lifelong education became essential at that point, as did the consistent practice of being open to all forms of knowledge. The simple coexistence of cultures would then be transformed into a genuine dialogue of civilizations.

Mr Nicholas BURNETT pointed out that in many developing countries, education is the success story not health, even though the latter is receiving more international financial support. Primary school enrolments in many developing countries have increased at a considerable rate. But he observed a lack of innovation in education, suggesting that more attention be given to collective or group learning. Teaching and learning processes could also be enriched by new findings in the field of neuroscience.

The contents of education deserve much greater focus, especially with regard to promoting respect for others, open-mindedness, tolerance and awareness of such crucial issues as sustainable development.

He stressed the importance of closing the opportunities gap in education and questioned whether education should be considered as an exclusively national responsibility. Instead, he stressed that it was vital to consider it as an international responsibility, notably with regards to providing more external aid to developing countries.

According to Ms Khunying Kasam Varavarn, political decision-makers often still had to be convinced not only that education required substantial political and financial investment, especially in times of crisis, but also that lifelong education was an essential objective if we genuinely wished to help disadvantaged populations.

To ensure that lifelong education became a reality for all people, it was vital to set up systems for the evaluation of qualifications that would recognize all forms of learning and create synergies between formal, informal and non-formal knowledge and indigenous knowledge systems.

Ms Khunying Kasama Varavarn concluded by observing that while it was difficult to know when education for all throughout life would be achieved, it was easy to see when we should act: immediately.

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SPEECHES OF THE PARTICIPANTS