PIMA Newsletter No. 9 CONTENTS
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PIMA Newsletter No. 9 December 2016 CONTENTS: 1. Editorial Who can get things done – and how? 2. Opinion Roger Boshier: Brexit + Trump - what went wrong with the learning society? Colin Flint: Messing up the neglected sector: England’s failed provision for further education and lifelong learning in the tertiary years John Field: Refugee integration – what kind of educational issue? 3. Member News & Profiles Steve Garlick: Committee member profile Bruce Wilson: The future of Europe post-Brexit 4. PIMA Committee News & Decisions 4th PIMA Committee Meeting, October 2016 Special Interest Group (SIG) on Lifelong Learning (LLL) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 5. New Members Yuan Dayong Ralf St. Clair Sumedha Sharma 6. Upcoming Events 14th Pascal International Conference PIMA Seminar on the SDGs and Lifelong Learning PIMA 2017 AGM, Annual Report and Elections EAFAE 2017 Conference OECD higher education stakeholder forum 1. Editorial Who can get things done, and how? Chris Duke Brave new world Fifteen years on. Another 9/11: another day of global drama and shock in the world’s most powerful country. This time not US-style 9/11 but the alternative 9th day of the 11th month: the US Presidential Election, and the choice of an unusual President-elect. In June, Britain voted to leave the European Union (only England and Wales voted thus among the four UK nations); for many people the referendum process demonstrated a massive failure of national lifelong learning. So far has the impossible become normal that the talk is now of another far Right presidential triumph: for French Front National leader Marie Le Pen. Maybe we have at least now collectively learned ‘never to say never’. Trump’s triumph sets the world, including us in PIMA, a new test, one relevant to other upcoming referenda and elections in Europe and worldwide: how to relearn the ethical conduct of open democracy as citizens and as political parties in a world of mass media and very rich and powerful lobbying interests, when national apathies and alienations encounter the threats of harassment, bullying and overt violence to achieve political ends. Our aspiration to think outside the box about lifelong learning and ‘the crisis in western democracy’ demands attention as never before. PIMA is one global network among many. In the spirit of Big Tent it seeks to work with ethically like- minded global and local networks: to influence, from education and learning, place, communal and societal knowledge perspectives, the linked issues that threaten civilisation and ultimately existence. Is an ethic of competitive acquisitive individualism is at the root of the malaise? PIMA needs to collaborate non-defensively and non-competitively at a deep cultural level with other agencies, networks, organisations and individuals to address what is now called existential threat. This needs the energy and ideas of all PIMA members and partner networks to think and talk through in action. Snatches of dialogue Agreeing and setting up the first Special Interest Group (SIG) on the SDGs (see below) involved much e-mail dialogue. This small sample of extracts first places a question mark against our previous Newsletter extolling of UNESCO: From the Association for Women in Development (AWID) conference there is a strong sense that what we need is “systems change not climate change”. As the critiques of the UN systems mount, with growing concern over the influence of TNCs [trans-national corporations] in the workings of the UN, how far the UN can lead change through the SDG process is being seriously questioned. This then raises the question as to what scope there is for the spaces created by SDGs to be used to try to influence a more radical ‘systems change’ agenda? It would be important to agree on what is the ‘political’ project which has any chance of influencing these processes. If there is to be a PIMA SIG on SDGs please let it be focused. I would prefer the focus towards local learning for personal and community development by citizens for and by themselves. How can PASCAL and PIMA enable local flourishing for local good? Let's have less policy for the policy-makers’ sake. 2 My overall objective would be for PIMA to develop a plan which would enable our talent to directly help citizens and communities to determine for themselves their own ways of constructive action to enable them to flourish for themselves. At the heart of it all is always what can PIMA usefully do among the plethora of networks, newsletters etc? While we need to discuss the challenges to education both globally (see SDGs) and locally (e.g. integration of the many thousands of refugees from the Near East and other regions/countries, primarily through education), we also need to formulate or identify concrete projects that we as PIMA can lead or contribute to. In both cases, we cannot do it alone but need to partner with other groups and/or institutions. The challenge before us requires answers to the following questions: What are such possible projects, and who should we partner with? Let's do something that results in something concrete. For example a panel at a conference, a joint research proposal to a research council or the EU, a jointly authored article in a widely distributed scholarly journal, another PURE-like activity with some region, large municipality, or small country. Readers of this Newsletter are invited and encouraged to help answer these questions. What do you think PIMA can best do? And what will best meet your own civil society and professional aspiration? The first PIMA SIG has now been launched. Please add your voice as it defines and pursues sought- after outcomes by writing to [email protected] cc to [email protected] Highlights in this Issue Readers are also invited to respond to any elements of this and other newsletters that feel relevant. Here you can read about the new and first PIMA Special Interest Group (SIG) on the Sustainable Development Goals, and two other proposed SIGs now under consideration. Before this Roger Boshier ensures in lively and well-informed ways that ‘lifelong learning’ is no sacred cow. Colin Flint critiques the treatment worse than neglect that has befallen the unglamorous non-university part of post-secondary education, at least in England, while John Field probes Germany’s LLL approach to refugees, the same challenge as was posed at the Pascal 2015 Catania Conference. We profile Steve Garlick’s service as a political party creator and leader (and welcome return to active leadership in the PIMA Committee), and welcome several new members. Bruce Wilson looks at Brexit not from the more usual inward UK perspective but from the direction of the Continent. Other items update members on PIMA management and development, inviting participation in choosing its new leadership for 2017-18, and in identifying future activities in which you may wish to take part. Note, in particular Enrico Jacobs’ warm invitation to the next big Pascal Conference, the task set there, and the participation invited. And on a lighter note? * "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron." *HL Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26th 1920. Thanks to Hans Schuetze for this ‘from an early visionary’. Maybe we will yet all be surprised. Please continue sending contributions for future Newsletters to [email protected] and [email protected]. 3 2. Opinion Brexit + Trump - what went wrong with the learning society? Roger Boshier New Zealand-born Roger Boshier, now emeritus professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, moved to Canada and became one of the continent’s leading adult education academics and critical thinkers. He is also a leading authority on adult education and lifelong learning in China. A prolific writer and hands-on Kiwi, he lives and labours on an island off Vancouver, a venue well known to some of the world’s leading lifelong learning scholars. Here he encapsulates the sorry narrative of ‘lifelong learning’ from genesis to and in 2016. Within hours of Brexit referendum results being announced a large number of UK citizens typed “European Union” into Google for a quick social studies lesson. Had they voted for something they knew nothing about? Soon thereafter, in a televised U.S. Presidential “debate” moderator Anderson Cooper (from CNN) asked Donald Trump if he realized sexual assault (and groping women without their permission) was against the law. Did Trump have the needed knowledge? “Do you know it is against the law?” said Cooper. Trump dodged the question. Groping comments were “locker-room talk.” “They were just words,” he said. Being proclaimed a crypto-fascist, sexual predator and man who has little respect for learning made no difference. On election day even fundamentalists in the U.S. bible belt shuffled over to their polling places and voted for Trump. It was a campaign thick with insults but devoid of policy. To what extent did US voters know (or care about) what they were voting for? In the meantime, Trump has announced a hard line on China. “I will sort them out,” he said. In the 1970s, if learning had become a societal preoccupation would it be reasonable to expect UK citizens now to know something about the European Union? In 2016 should a U.S. Presidential candidate know sexual assault is a crime? If knowledge is power, do ordinary citizens have it? Faure (1972) and other architects of the learning society hoped people would learn across all stages of the life cycle and within a significantly expanded range of non-formal and informal (as well as formal) settings.