Learning for life

The old pattern of formal education, followed by a career-for-life, then decades of retirement, is outdated – and unsustainable, argues Sara Parkin.

We need a new culture of life-long learning, a new respect for experience, and a vision of education with breadth and depth. It has always struck me as potty that we divide our lives into three entirely different phases. For the first third, we strive to get a good enough education, so that in the second phase we can get a good enough job, all in order to pay for the pension that enables us to spend the final third of our lives waiting to die.

When children were being used as slave labour in the mines and loom shops of the industrial revolution, and when living beyond 50 was quite an achievement, replacing the working day with a school room for the young and retiring the old from hard labour may have made sense. But is that really still the case? In the developed world at least, some young people see the classroom as a prison and the world of work as relative freedom. And few people, rich or poor, are uni-talented, or have narrow interests. Given the choice, how many would want to learn to be an accountant or a plumber and then spend all their working days doing – and learning – nothing else?

Meanwhile, what of the third age? As we live longer, and as it becomes clear that people who remain intellectually and physically active into old age have a better quality of life, what is the point of a retirement that can last for 30 years?

If sustainable development means cutting out waste from the way we use resources such as energy and raw materials, surely it means the same for the way we use people. How wasteful to retire the abundant wisdom and experience embodied in your average 60 year old! Why are so few of the lessons they have learned, so little of the experience they’ve accrued, fed directly back into the system? And why do we train young and inexperienced people to become teachers when there is a wealth of under-utilised knowledge and skills out there already? For sure, some of it isn’t relevant to the future, but why can’t the new generation enjoy the immediacy of negotiating what goes forward, and what gets dumped, with the people who’ve gone before, rather than do it second hand through textbooks or online? Why does learning, in short, have to take us away from interactions with real life?

These are the crucial questions facing anyone interested in a truly sustainable education system. And, for all the investment – and rhetoric – now going into the sector, they are ones that are only just beginning to be addressed by policy makers. There are moves to introduce mentoring and work experience into the learning cycle at school and in universities and colleges. And from September, the school curriculum will cover citizenship, including sustainable development, as part of an attempt to encourage young people to participate more fully in the community and democracy in which they live.

Welcome though such policies – and cash allocations – may be, they nevertheless only tinker at the edges of a formal education system which, especially post-school, is increasingly at odds with the human and social capital it is supposed to create and serve. Even in its own terms, it struggles to deliver consistent quality and equality. For everyone to be able to learn for their personal fulfilment as well as for the benefit of the society in which they live is, as Tony Blair suggests, the least we can expect of a society that likes to call itself civilised. The government’s Education and Skills Strategy does imply that self-realisation and a contribution to common goals is the purpose behind its robust reforms. But it doesn’t address the learn-work-retire pattern; which remains at odds with the way many of us would prefer to go through life. And there is not a whisper about the sorts of skills and knowledge that need to be embedded into all university and college courses for the UK to avoid being left flat- (not to say wet-) footed in the face of the greatest challenge the human species has ever faced: sustainable development.

Amid all the publicity of Johannesburg, it’s worth remembering that at the first ‘Earth Summit’ in Stockholm in 1972, world leaders contemplated an 11-foot high pile of evidence that the earth’s environment was struggling to cope with the overwhelming demands humans were placing on it. Education was held out even then as a major tool for transforming the situation. If only people had sufficient knowledge and skills to ensure that their own choices and actions took the path of human progress in a sustainable direction, ran the logic, then we would be home and dry. Yet three decades on, and the statesmen assembled in South Africa find themselves faced with another accumulation of evidence – too huge to measure in feet, metres or bytes – that over the last 30 years no major negative trend has even been slowed, never mind halted. And education is, as it has been in the intervening period, nowhere.

It took until this September for sustainable development to enter the school curriculum formally as a cross cutting theme. And, although Sir Howard Newby, chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council of England, believes it should be integrated into mainstream programmes, there is no legislation that says universities must do this – as there is, for example, on equal opportunities.

Although a stupid amount of time has been lost, there is one way the government education department could break the elderly mould of our formal education system, and that’s lifelong learning. First floated in a green paper by David Blunkett, when education secretary, it could help ensure that our formal education supports, rather than gets in the way of, the new ways of working, living and learning needed for the new century.

At present, from the minute we leave nursery school (the only redoubt in our formal educational system where inter- and multi-disciplinary learning is encouraged, even celebrated) our learning is channelled into subjects that steadily shrink in number until we leave school or college. Yet at the same time, employers are demanding a broader range of skills and knowledge. Businesses, especially small ones, want plumbers with good social skills, and accountants who can communicate more than just numbers. Employers are increasingly interested in staff with the ability to translate the challenge of sustainable development into a practical ‘to do’ list for Monday morning. The education system is not producing them, and the muddled world of off- and on-the-job training isn’t either.

Meanwhile, although the policy and spending reviews are all but over, our universities and colleges are still under enormous pressure to reform. As well as widening participation, government is demanding more efficiency, better governance and improved quality in teaching. At the same time, competition pressures are growing – for funds, for students, for good staff. Institutions are having to change. But what if they grasped this chance to turn the idea that learning is for life into a practical reality for more and more people? A few institutions are starting to make it easier for young people to work for a few years before going back into full time education, or to study part time. Although this is mostly linked to the need of students to pay for their studies, their work- or life-based experience could at least be structured so it counts towards a degree or diploma.

Many women (and men) would readily trade a sabbatical of two, five or even 10 years, when their children are young or their parents need care, for a pledge to work until the age of 70 or 75. Even more would prefer to work part time. Universities can’t force employers to make either possible, but they could show the way by establishing partnerships with companies to fast track ‘time-outers’ back into the workplace. Career enhancement modules could give them as good a chance of career progression as their full time colleagues. People in work, or retired from work, could play important roles in individual and collective lifelong learning programmes, in a way which also benefited themselves.

Given all that, it’s odd that the connections between lifelong learning, enterprise and sustainable development remain under-exploited both south and north of the border. In England, there’s surely a case for Margaret Hodge to be Minister of State for Higher Education and Lifelong Learning. And for higher education to come into the portfolio of Iain Gray, Minister of Enterprise and Lifelong Learning in Scotland. If, at its most basic, securing a sustainable future means running an economy on minimal use of natural resources and maximum use of human ingenuity and social collaboration, then surely we should be equipping people with the skills and knowledge this sort of economy needs. So why aren’t Hodge and Gray driving higher and further education policy in this direction? We have wasted time thinking information technology was the whole story, when it is just part of it. Universities have played an important role in the research revealing how our misplaced choices and actions have damaged the environment and sustained social injustice. If they want to play a significant role in helping society to design and deliver the solutions, which includes changing not only what we learn but also how, where and when we learn it, then they must take the current mood for reform in that direction.

As Michael Meacher put it earlier this year: “The importance of universities to sustainability is hard to overstate. What universities do is magnified through the generations.”

Sara Parkin. is programme director of Forum for the Future and leads its education and learning programme (ELP).
ELP, 020 7477 7720

16 September 2002

Sara Parkin