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Thank you for joining us for breakfast this morning
As Robert Giroux said in his introduction, the Canadian Council on Learning sees learning as the foundation of a strong society and of economic prosperity. CCL’s vision is to be a catalyst for lifelong learning across Canada.
However, we recognize that countries around the world are facing the same challenges Canada faces, and are asking the same questions we ask about how to create a learning society. We have entered the century of the global, knowledge-based society, and a gathering such as the Montreal Conference would not be complete without some kind of dialogue on the role of learning in the modern world.
For those of you who have come to this Montreal Conference from outside of Canada, all this may have a ring of familiarity.
One of the earliest manifestations of this international focus on learning issues came from UNESCO, when it asked Jacques Delors to chair a Task Force studying learning for the 21st century. The book that resulted was called Learning: the Treasure Within, and it became a powerful plea to view education in a much broader context than we normally do.
Delors described the four pillars of learning that would enable individuals to achieve their full potential.
The first pillar is learning to know—that is, acquisition of knowledge and mastery of the learning tools, such as concentration, memory and analysis;
The second pillar is learning to do—that is, occupational and practical skills; The third pillar is learning to live together—that is, learning that improves the ability to respect and understand one another, and to build strong and cohesive communities; and
The fourth and final pillar is learning to be—that is, to pursue the complete fulfilment of the person, as an individual, as a member of a family and community, as a citizen and producer, as an inventor and dreamer.
These four pillars have helped shape the dialogue on learning, both in our respective countries and in international fora such as this. There seems to be a high degree of consensus worldwide: the greater the degree to which we reinforce each of these pillars, the greater our chances of creating dynamic and sustainable societies, built upon the strengths of individual citizens.
One international body that has sought to promote learning issues was the State of the World Forum, founded in 1995. Over the following years, it held meetings that brought together leaders, citizens and institutions, much as the Montreal Conference does.
As is the case with the Montreal Conference, the State of the World Forum is a non-governmental body that brings together leaders from all walks of life—from governments, business, the arts and cultural communities, and from civil society. As with this Conference, we address emerging issues of global concern from an integrated and humanistic perspective.
The leaders and decision-makers who came together at the 2000 meeting of the State of the World Forum recognized that one of the many challenges now facing humanity is the impact of globalization on people and their institutions, and on the biosphere. Too often, the social consequences of globalization are seen as an afterthought, or as an unfortunate, and unavoidable, consequence of progress.
The challenge, as we saw it, was to respond to globalization with positive change—to shape globalization with human hands, and encourage more citizens to be architects of the global village. In response, the State of the World Forum created a Commission on Globalization in 2001. The Commission identified six Policy Action Groups that would be the focus of ongoing discussion and debate and—more importantly—the focus of practical advice that we would provide for decision-makers.
One of the six Policy Action Groups was dedicated to bringing together the knowledge from the ongoing discoveries about how people learn. There has been a marvellous explosion in our understanding of the learning process over the past decades. The accelerating momentum of this knowledge is similar to the revolution in modern communications technologies. The Policy Action Group on Learning sought to frame this knowledge about how people learn in such a way that it could be easily used by people responsible for creating public policy that affects learning.
A few of the original members of PAG-L met here yesterday to review progress made by the Group, and to discuss future directions. I am pleased that they are with us today and would like to recognize them and the important work that they have accomplished so far for international education through PAG-L.
I am very pleased that my PAG-L colleagues could join us this morning. I believe there is tremendous scope for the PAG-L and the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) to work together to promote learning both in Canada and around the world.
As some of you know, before assuming my role at CCL, I spent eight years as Director General of the Council of Ministers of Education of Canada. In that time, I was obliged to concede that the Council’s capacity to utilize or disseminate innovative or successful approaches from other countries was very restricted. After all, an intergovernmental body such as the Council of Ministers of Education was constrained by internal political considerations. But CCL does not have these constraints. It is autonomous, and it is capable of pursuing ideas that may be helpful to Canada, wherever they may be found. And the PAG-L is an excellent source of knowledge from the international community on the challenges that learners around the world face, and innovative ways to address those challenges.
Canadian learners and the international community can benefit from the partnership between CCL and PAG-L. CCL will be able to disseminate some of our own work and ideas through PAG-L to international bodies with which PAG-L has worked in the past. These include UNESCO, the British Council, the World Bank, UNICEF, UNDP, the Commonwealth of Learning, and others. We will also be able to tap into ideas that have emerged elsewhere in the world. Some of those emerge from OECD work, and from the experience of the individual developed countries which are members of OECD. But because it also includes countries from the developing world, the Policy Action Group on Learning casts a somewhat wider net.
I want to emphasize that the partnership between CCL and PAG-L does not run in one direction only—flowing from Canada to other countries through the PAG-L. If there is anything we have learned in international education circles, it is that, in the realm of ideas, such a one-way donor–receiver model will fail. It will fail because these one-way transfers of ideas fail to take into account the importance of mobilization of ideas. In fact, one of the central ideas of CCL is that knowledge mobilization in the learning field in this country is at least as important as the production of new knowledge through research. CCL will therefore search out interesting and promising practices and learning models anywhere, and will challenge Canadians to consider these.
There is good potential to transfer ideas and useful practices between the PAG-L and CCL because both organizations are linked in a profound way and at several levels—and not just because of my involvement in both. Both are philosophically and conceptually grounded in the internationally-recognized UNESCO pillars of education that I outlined a few minutes ago. This means that the Canadian experience, on which CCL reports, can be expressed in the international language and ideals that UNESCO and other international bodies convey. For example, CCL has just issued a Composite Learning Index. It explicitly balances UNESCO’s four pillars of education in its analysis of indicators measuring the progress of learning in Canada.
For those of you who don’t know about the index, it is composed of 15 indicators that reflect learning throughout all phases of life—at school, at work, in the community and at home.
It includes data related to all four pillars outlined by Delors. There are indicators for workplace training, volunteerism and exposure to culture, for example. And under the Learning to Know pillar, the Composite Learning Index uses, among other things, post-secondary attainment rates and PISA data. All these indicators are combined to calculate a ‘score’ that measures how learning conditions in a community foster success in a number of social and economic ways.
The index also generates scores for each pillar, at the community level and at the provincial level. This breakdown allows communities to start asking tough questions about how well they are fostering the conditions for learning. It also enables them to find similar communities across the country, from which they may be able to discover a better way of doing things.
As you can see from the Composite Learning Index, many of the tools and methods that CCL creates to respond to the learning needs of Canadians will be highly relevant to the circumstances and issues of other countries—in both the developed and the developing world. To underline this point, I’d just like to mention that CCL has been invited to present the Composite Learning Index at an OECD conference later this month.
I am not suggesting that Canadian models are suited to all contexts. There are no so-called best practices—merely promising ones. Useful practices are those which are introduced successfully in a specific context.
But I do propose that a national body such as CCL is a useful medium for contributing knowledge to an international group such as the PAG-L. We can contribute knowledge about the Canadian experience generally and the work of our Council in particular. That contribution can be both technical, as in statistical constructions like the Composite Learning Index, or in the dissemination of our results in research and knowledge mobilization on learning.
And we can learn. By drawing upon the information provided by the PAG-L, Canada can consider learning approaches from countries both developed and developing. To take but one example: the issue of culture is a cross-cutting dimension of importance to CCL—but preservation and enhancement of both culture and language is also critical for many countries in the southern hemisphere. Indeed, it is one of the seven principal themes of PAG-L. And Canada can learn much from their experience.
Let me just summarize very briefly the seven themes of PAG-L. These are the seven issues we—in both the North and the South—saw as crucial to the future of learning in a global society.
The summaries must be perfunctory. However, you will find in the room copies of the PAG-L document entitled “Globalisation and Learning: Putting Humanity First,” as well as other related documents and texts of speeches.
The first issue was the impact of information and communications technology (ICT) on learning. The question is not simply the way that ICT has revolutionized how we amass and transmit information. On the one hand, ICT can help break down barriers and promote sensitive and responsive human development. Paul Drucker wrote about transformative change in how technology reshapes the very idea of the world and our place in it. And Marshall McLuhan used to speak of media creating another kind of nervous system in the human.
But on the other hand, some observers wonder whether ICT will mean the demise of learning systems as we know them—we may be throwing away some of the personal interaction that has shown to be essential to learning. In primary education, there is no technological substitute yet devised that can be as effective as a teacher working directly with a learner.
So we ask, how can ICT improve learning systems, and under what conditions do we optimise learning by using ICT? And what difference does the state of economic development make to the impact of ICT on learning? How can we ensure that the resources available in tele-learning and Internet-assisted learning remain culturally sensitive?
The growth of ICT in learning accelerates the need to look at a second question: the role of the private sector in learning. There is growing demand for education, including vocational training. The opportunities and challenges—not to mention the costs—of tele-learning have opened the door to private sector involvement in education.
This is especially true where governments are not responding to learning needs. Globalization and increased student mobility require new skills, such as English, the use of technology, and teamwork. The public sector has difficulty marshalling the resources to respond. The private sector has always played an important role in the philanthropy of education, but more and more it is being called upon to play a direct role.
The British Council has explored this issue through the work of its Education and Training Group. It began by coming up with a working definition of what is, after all, a fast-changing issue. It defined private sector education as any learning that is not provided by national government—or, in Canada, by federal or provincial government. In other words, the British Council definition is broad enough to include corporations, private education bodies, and education foundations, including cooperatives and community projects. It includes collaboration between government and corporation, or corporations and institutions.
But the question arises as to whether the market should be determining our learning environment. There are possible conflicts between profit and delivery of the best education.
There is a role for the public sector to regulate private-sector education. Who should set the standards? How should they be enforced? And what are the conditions under which the involvement of the private sector will optimise individual and collective learning?
Different societies will come up with different solutions for the role of the private sector. Each must find its balance between the rights to universality and accessibility.
This leads me to a third broad issue we were examining in the Policy Action Group on Learning: the respective roles and responsibilities for various stakeholders in the learning system. These responsibilities can be divided between “upstream” policy roles, and “downstream” delivery roles. To encourage mutual understanding and support between the two objectives, we need to raise awareness of key crosscutting issues and differing objectives.
We need to reconcile different agendas of the providers and recipients of education. There is a role here for an independent body—an “honest broker” who can help set priorities and catalyze action.
The fourth issue the Policy Action Group on Learning examined was the importance of culture, preservation and human rights in the learning system. This takes us back to Jacques Delors’ four pillars of learning. In today’s world, most of the emphasis in the education system is placed on “learning to do.” How do we ensure that education also entails “learning to live together?”
The challenge is to ensure that learning strategies promote basic human rights. There are no simple solutions. It involves crafting a learning system that promotes civil interaction and local empowerment. At the same time, we need to reconcile effective learning strategies with concerns for cultural and linguistic heritage. We need to recognize that cultural diversity means different things in different nations.
Jacques Delors’ pillars of learning also help to frame the discussion of our fifth issue: Learning as an Individual Pursuit. How to strike the balance between learning for work and learning for self-actualization? Or, in Delors’ terms, learning to do versus learning to be.
The sixth issue involves the paradigm shift in our time toward the notion of lifelong learning. One result of increasing the duration of learning across the lifespan is to shift from the supply side of education to the demand side. Demand-driven learning implies greater accountability towards learners. This means that monitoring of quality of curriculum, of methods and of delivery becomes significant. It also means diversity in how we respond to learners’ demands.
If access to basic education is limited to formal school systems in some parts of the world, we face the prospect of a serious “knowledge divide” if other cultures make better use of non-formal and informal learning outside of the classroom.
But at the same time, opening up the discussion to respond to the demand for lifelong learning is also opening up new opportunities and solutions to reaching out to the “left behinds” and learners who were previously considered unreachable.
Finally, our seventh issue was to improve the tools for learning. We don’t just want to articulate goals for learning; we need to define what tools will help us reach those goals. Different circumstances will require different tools and approaches. In Canada, as elsewhere, one of the major issues is maintaining the long-term supply of teachers and trainers, and ensuring that they all have the tools required to keep abreast of changes.
Ladies and gentlemen, these were the issues that we were examining in the Policy Action Group on Learning, as part of the mandate of the State of the World Forum. The issues are important to Canada and to other nations trying to reshape learning systems in this new era of globalization.
I hope that we can take advantage of the Conference de Montréal to re-energize the discussion of these issues, and re-activate the commitment of those who had given so generously of their time and expertise to the Commission on Globalization. I know that my colleagues on the Policy Action Group found the discussion thought-provoking and fulfilling, and has helped guide our actions and advice in our respective countries. But the time has begun to renew the dialogue at an international level.
I hope that we can continue to work together to share ideas and help guide policy makers around the world on issues related to learning. And there is no better place or time to begin bringing people together to talk about shaping globalization to promote a learning culture everywhere than right here in Montreal, and right now at this morning’s breakfast.
Thank you. I would be pleased to respond to any questions that you may have.
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