"lifelong learning" and other paradigms used by educators

Last night students in my class on UNESCO described the projects that they had been working on during the semester. The combination of two of the presentations joined in my consciousness to provoke this posting:

• One student focused on non-formal education. Of course there are many kinds of educational services that fall under this category, but I think they all share the characteristic in the mind of the education system that they involve educators who facilitate learning.
• The other student spoke dealt with special needs education. This seems to be a euphemism for the the provision of educational services to kids with some kind of physical, mental or social problem.

I think the semantics here are natural. Educators have to talk about what they do, and they utilize words from their general cultural surroundings to do so, modifying the meanings of those words and turning them into jargon. Of course other professions do the same thing.

Still, think of Lincoln and Franklin, both people who attained both considerable knowledge of the world and considerable wisdom with very little schooling nor input of "educators". It is hard not to conclude that they merited the title of, educated people, but their educations were anything but the formal processes of their times.

Thinking of my own experience, I had 20 years of classroom instruction, but most of what I have learned, and most that it important to me, I learned outside of the classroom.

It also occurred to me that I spent a lot of time in this very class trying to recognize the special circumstances of each student (background, interests, portfolio of abilities, and goals) in order to tailor the course experience to suit that student. I tried to treat each student as having specific needs from that class, and to treat each of those needs as "special".

As I understand it, the Education For All movement that was catalyzed by world conferences in Jontiem and Dakar sought to revolutionize the paradigm of education, substituting facilitation of "lifelong learning" for "schooling" as the theme about which educators would conceptualize their professional work.

Such a new paradigm would link to the increasing interests in learning organizations, especially since the most important way for an organization to learn is for its members to learn as individuals. It would also link to the opportunities for learning provided by the Information Revolution, both in the sense of the automation of information functions and to the increase in information available to the individual via information and communication technology.

Not surprisingly, as I understand it, with the Millennium Development Goals initiative, the emphasis in international educational services went to the provision of basic schooling to everyone. That was an objective that donors could invest in -- more schools, more teachers, more materials. Not a bad objective, especially since even that objective was too ambitious to be achieved by 2015. I expect that the next generation of Development Goals will look not only to getting the rest of the kids to school for at least the primary grades, but to seeing that those schools at least meet basic quality standards.

Still, I love the metaphor of the "knowledge society", and I would love to see an educational paradigm defined that encouraged competency based, individual learning for everyone during their entire lives.

Click here for the image source