Jarvis, P. (2010) Adult Education and Lifelong Learning, Chapter 2

2020 Spring Term, GS course Textbook:

Jarvis, P. (2010) Adult Education and Lifelong Learning: Theory and Practice, Routledge.

Adult Education and Lifelong Learning: Theory and Practice

作者:Jarvis, Peter
2010/02/10

Globalization
Emergence of the learning society

Chapter 2. The Learning Society

大意「学習は社会的文脈の中で生じ、社会の影響を受けて変化」

Globalization

Central-peripheral relationship. At the heart of each society – certainly in the West – is the core, which exercises power over the whole society. The next most powerful group in most societies is made up of international agencies (WB, IMF)... Only when we reach the third level do we come to national governments and then local and regional agencies. This means that the idea of national territorial sovereignty has long disappeared, and even national political leaders have only limited power (pp. 21-22).

The arts and the humanities are distinguished from the really ‘useful’ subjects such as the sciences and social sciences; the transnational corporations consigned the humanities to leisure time, and for them education was to be the handmaiden of industry, taking the raw material of humanity and turning it into the human resources that would drive the world. .. even post-school education has been placed within the ambit of the Minister for Business and Industry in the 2009 British government! Adult educators know that, in the United Kingdom at least, many of the liberal adult education subjects not only have been consigned to leisure time but have been priced at such an exorbitant fee that few people are able to afford to enrol in them. ... But those who control the educational process exercise the major power in teaching and learning since they control the content, so that those who have the greatest social educational needs – the industrialists – have now assumed a very powerful place in society. (p. 23).

It is clear from this analysis that not only is education controlled by the economics of the situation, but it is also a political phenomenon, although few political studies of the education of adults exist (see Torres, 2009). Education will become even more functionally orientated – as part of the Ministry for Business and industry – as the need to generate more goods and services in order to recreate consumerism. ... During this same period, however, there has been a growing awareness that many of the poor of the world have largely been illiterate, and so UNESCO and the United Nations... have introduced a literacy campaign. The argument has always been that only by being literate could the poor people play their part in the global world economy. Once education is seen in this way, it is politicized. It is not surprising, therefore, that the work of Paulo Freire became very popular at one time, but careful analysis of Freire's work is important to understand where and why it has been successful and where it has been less successful. Freire always presented his understanding of education as being a servant of the people or community in a time of political unrest, so that it was very successful in Latin America but less successful in Africa, where he also worked for a number of years. (p. 24).

For instance, Oliveira and Oliveira (1976:49) suggest that:

[i]f the literacy campaign is to go beyond the celebration of the past [a political unrest generated by the people] and provide an opening towards the future ... the chosen region must be in the process of experiencing a socio-economic transformation. This point seems particularly important to us, for it is questionable whether learning to read and write corresponds to the real need of the peasant living in a rural area who continues to produce in traditional ways. (quoted in Torres, 2009:165)

My own PhD student showed how in Nepal, once the UNESCO officials left any literacy endeavour, it soon died (Laksamba, 2005). Indeed, despite all the aid given to Nepal, while the literacy rate had improved, it was not presented to the people in the politically relevant (p. 25).

Emergence of the learning society

1. The information society

we do have to recognize that the information carried and transmitted by technology almost always has use-value, and in this sense it is far from value-free (ウェーバーの認識方法論で、価値評価から距離を置いた自由な態度) – although those who provide that information and those who seek it are in a market exchange situation and so we see that the predominant culture of the capitalist system prevails and the information that has potentially the most use-value is the most valuable. (p. 26).

Webster (2002:141) also refers to the work of Schiller (1981:25), whose discussion comes very close to our model:

What is called the ‘information society’ is, in fact, the production, processing, and transmission of a very large amount of data about all sorts of matters – individual and national, social and commercial, economic and military. Most of the data are produced to meet very specific needs of super-corporations, national and government bureaucracies, and the military establishments of the advanced industrial state.(p. 27).

2. The knowledge economy

Stehr (1994) suggested that the knowledge society is based not on all forms of knowledge, but on scientific knowledge. But this knowledge has grown in volume and changes rapidly, so that Senge (1990:69) makes a significant point that perhaps for the first time in human history, humankind now produces more knowledge than people can absorb, but the knowledge economy fails to utilize a great deal of the knowledge that exists. Crudely, it divides knowledge into useful knowledge and the remainder, which is regarded wrongly as much less useful, and this has affected the way that we think about knowledge, since it is mainly only the ‘useful knowledge’ that is included in curricula and funded by governments. The types of knowledge necessary for us to learn in order to live together and care for the planet are omitted (see Jarvis, 2008, for a full discussion of this) (pp. 28-29).

3. The learning society

We can divide knowledge into four types: fact, data, information and knowledge. Only the last is learned; the other three are objective and remain outside the person. Facts have no meaning but they can be data that contribute towards the building of meaning, while information can be another person's knowledge that the recipients have to learn in order for it to become their knowledge. The more rapidly knowledge changes, the more the recipients have to learn and the more society emphasizes this need to learn. The learning society – as a concept – is therefore the inevitable outcome of societies focusing on both information and knowledge. ... the learning society is associated with social change. The more prevalent or profound the changes that occur in a society, the greater the likelihood that it will be regarded as a learning society because its members have to learn in order to keep abreast with structural and work-based changes. There is a clear sense that there are two different types of knowledge: i) that necessary for social and cultural life, which once we have learned we can take for granted; and ii) that which is work-based in order to increase consumption or that which is necessary for the military defense of the people. (p. 29).

However, one aspect of a learning society not touched upon in Coffield's report is that of everyday learning, which occurs in what Beck (1992) calls reflexive modernity. Coffield (2000:22) makes an implicit reference to this when he claims that the phrase ‘We're all learning all the time’ is anodyne. The fact that we are being forced to learn all the time is actually the very basis of a learning society, rather than an educative one, something that underlies many of the projects in this programme. Society is changing so rapidly that many of the traditional educative organizations are not able to keep abreast with the new demands, and so individuals are forced to learn outside of the education system. Much of this is either unplanned or uncontrolled, or both, but it is an aspect crucial to contemporary society – for the learning society is also reflexive. This form of everyday learning is a crucial dimension of the learning society but it is one that cannot be controlled, something that is very important when we consider the complex nature of teaching. Only those who have disengaged from society are not really being forced to learn a great deal, and even they are still exposed to some of the forces of change. (pp. 30-31).

Learning organizations were slow to emerge because of the bureaucratic pressures of traditional organizational structures. Argyris & Schon (1978:26) claim that since the Second World War it has gradually become apparent not only to business firms but to all types of organizations that the requirements of organizational learning are growing.

It is also the relationship between personal learning and the organization that Senge (1990) addressed in The Fifth Discipline. His first four disciplines are personal: how we think, what we want, how we interact and how we learn from one another (ibid.:11). His fifth discipline is systems thinking, which is social, when integration of thought and practice in a shared vision across the whole organization can stimulate change and efficiency in an organization. For Senge (ibid.:13), a learning organization is a place where individuals are ‘continually discovering how they can create their reality’ – it is a place of discovery, growth and development that results in more dynamic and creative solutions. (p. 33).

Systems theory is open to critical discussion on at least seven counts, according to Abercrombie et al. (2000:354–355): i) It cannot deal adequately with conflict or change, ii) Its assumptions about equilibrium on society are based on a conservative ideology, iii) It is so abstract that its empirical references are hard to detect, iv) Its assumptions about value consensus are not well grounded, v) It is difficult to reconcile assumptions about structural procedures with a theory of action, vi) The teleological assumptions cannot explain underdevelopment or underutilization, and vii) It is tautologous and vacuous.(p. 34).

... we could proceed to argue that the persons within the organization, and their learning, are not really considered within the framework of power. Indeed, change only happens when power is exerted within the organization itself – by managers! Hence, the learning organization appears to be a management theory for managers but it is weak conceptually, sociologically and educationally. It is necessary, therefore, to recognize that power is not the only issue that needs to be understood in the learning organization; it is also necessary to understand who the trendsetters are and how innovations spread through the company. People are important in the process, and it is people, as actors – change agents – who are played down in these discussions. Thus, it is important to return to re-examine the relationship between structure and action and learning. (p. 34).

The learning organization is different from bureaucracy, not because it does not have a hierarchy, but because the hierarchy have learned to create more open procedures for information processing so that they can facilitate or implement directly the outcomes that they and others in the organization have learned.(p. 35).

One of the other outcomes of globalization has been that we have become more aware of the local – a form of glocalization.Robertson 1995 in Featherstone, et.al. eds. Global Modernities, London: Sage p.31) makes the point that ‘there is an increasingly globe-wide discourse of locality, community, home, and the like’, and so it is not surprising that there should be a focus on the local. (pp. 35-36).

A learning city network evolved, and the European Commission (2003) supported the development of networks to promote and support lifelong learning locally and regionally. This is about social capital rather than human capital: Field et al. (2000:243) suggest that social capital offers ‘one way of apprehending and analysing the embeddedness of education in social networks’. But they go on to say that ‘it also challenges the dominant human capital approaches ... which concentrate on narrowly defined, short-term results or tidy analytical devices’. The outset of their argument is that social capital actually provides many opportunities for informal learning but that it is inherently narrowing – which is precisely the same type of argument that has existed for years about the advantages and disadvantages of living in small communities. However, Field et al. produce considerable evidence. Social capital takes us back to the ideas of the community and the community spirit, phenomena that have apparently declined tremendously as a result of the division of labour (Putman, 2000), although the same concern about the decline existed nearly a century ago. It might well be that this reflects the social process of constructing ideal communities, but we either see them as utopian and in the future or locate them in a dim and distant past! In both cases their function is to illustrate that we do not live in a perfect society – but then, we may never ever do so! What these studies have shown, however, is that there are community resources that can enrich human living, although they might have their drawbacks; these resources might aid informal learning, but through planning and learning we can create conditions and structures through which human living may be enriched. However, we cannot dictate that the community spirit will be created or learned.(p. 37).