Professional Documents
Culture Documents
2, 2007
ROBERTO CARNEIRO1
To tackle such a vast and complex agenda lies well beyond the possibilities of one
single enterprise. Rather, this issue of EJE will focus on how the learning systems
© 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ,
UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
152 European Journal of Education
learn and new paradigms of learning, in particular drawing together and further
exploring broad questions such as:
— If we do not like the present situation, should we change it, change the
people in it, or change ourselves?
— How do we govern the emerging, highly densely networked society? How
can we plan for innovation in a complex environment where ‘planning
causes failure and fails to reduce risk’? How can we adapt our learning
systems for conditions of complexity and a lifelong continuum of learning?
— How can co-production and co-creation flourish in a system based on the
assessment of individuals? Can we match universal requirements and
individual needs?
— Can our 19th-century institutions lead us into the 21st? How can the
education system successfully link the past, present and future? How can
schools adjust their role within wider structures of society? How can we
address the gaps in culture and mindset between pupils and teachers? How
can we enable a shift in the balance from control to participation — for
learners and teachers?
— We can innovate where learning is voluntary. How can we innovate in the
compulsory education sector?
— How can we embed successful innovation? Replicate and scale (the differ-
ence between ‘fresh’ and ‘canned’)? If novelty and unfamiliarity are key to
innovation, how can it be sustainable? Is ‘sustainable unfamiliarity’ a
paradox? What can we learn from the failure to learn from previous rounds
of innovation? Much of today’s ‘innovation’ reinvents yesterday’s wheel.
— What are the theoretical resources from outside education policy and
practice that we can draw on for our challenge?
— How can we balance spontaneity and innovation with needs for order,
assessment and evaluation?
— How can we address the ‘soul’ needs of learners?
— How do we reconcile diverse approaches with equity and coherence?
We will be witnessing exponential change in the ways we teach and learn. Little
doubt can remain about that. Just imagine the scope and breadth of consequences
of the mass distribution of the US $100 laptop to all classrooms of the planet; or
the impact of high speed broadband Internet on students’ learning styles and
preferences; or the day when podcasting classes become the norm; or the gener-
alisation of open source campus serving disenfranchised regions and peoples of the
globe; or the dissemination of quantum computing working on solar energy panels;
or the merging of new media companies with traditional universities to generate
new forms of customised learning networks and communities of practice.
The future agenda challenges our capacity to dream and our common vision of
what will constitute a true and lasting learning society.2
crab’s pincers, the bird’s beak or the octopus’ tentacle. Indeed, human survival is
dependent on the production and use of technology. From his very early days,
Homo faber has resorted to technological breakthroughs to extend the power of the
brain, his only truly specialised organ. Technological creation is a way of human
differentiation. Its formidable advances have served well the Homo faber in his
constant search for tools of survival, protection, shelter, hunting and gathering.
Ironically, technological progress has also come to shape the minds of those who
are their prime inventors. Humankind gradually learns to study, understand,
interpret and make sense with and through technology: Homo sapiens has acquired
a unique technological nature. However, one ought to say that Homo sapiens
precedes technology in his quest for meaning — mind before machine — in the
same way that complexity overrules linearity — the supremacy of a world of cultural
diversity and plurality over a world of first-order technological uniformity.
Education is the ultimate realm of the Homo sapiens sapiens. Nonetheless, it is
fraught with oracles preaching technological novelty, and one cannot help eliciting
innovation and enterprise as growing concerns in learning; but also, by mission —
even design — education is a place of preservation and transmission.This dual role
of both conserving and liberating, with its potential for contradiction, conflict and
even immobilisation, is more present today than ever before.5 One could even say
that this pervasive duality in education is compounded today by a rapidly changing
society. It is as if the ‘old order’ of thinking is being replaced by new paradigms of
understanding reality and of foreseeing our common predicament.
Technological discovery has seized our daily life. The increasing speed of
change makes it difficult for us to stop and reflect. The future proves less and less
to be the simple projection of the past. This is the ‘age of discontinuity’ to quote a
remarkable contemporary analyst, P. Drucker.
Education — the supreme social function — is ‘caught’ between ‘two fires’, two
kinds of society, in the transition of millennia. Evermore placed in the thin
borderline between stability and change, between preservation and innovation,
education undergoes unprecedented tensions. Indeed, educational systems are a
mirror of all the contradictions that strike our modern societies.
In our old society — stable, simple and repetitive — memory controlled project,
principles were immutably passed on, and exemplary patterns could be preserved
as archetypes. It is the primacy of structure over genesis. In our new society —
unstable, inventive and innovative — project overcomes memory, future controls
the past, patterns are constantly being put to question. It is the primacy of genesis
over structure. Society — old or new — is the natural environment for humans.
Human beings cannot survive out of society. Education, in its intrinsic sociality, is
forged by cultural experience and social learning.
Knowledge and learning constitute the two faces of one same coin: they
represent the process of societal ascent from the ‘primitive’ forms of industry and
information — predominantly economic-driven — to the more ‘advanced’ forms
of community and freedom — determined by cultural achievement. Technology
provides the ladder to climb the value chain.
information appears to become accessible to all, within the reach of our bare
fingertips, the more the gulf separating a developed world and an underdeveloped
sub-world widens every day when measured in terms of effective learning oppor-
tunities. The consolidation of a Global Learning Village unequivocally places the
issues of differential learning opportunities and knowledge disparities in the front
line of international action.
Major knowledge gaps and learning inequalities are fundamental breaches in
the social brokerage systems of information. The lessons delivered by our recent
past show that welfare gaps stand a strong chance of widening in the new economy.
We need to move beyond the technological fallacy of a connected world. The real
challenge is to create a bonded world. Connectivity — or the death of distance —
ought to translate into greater personal proximity: achieving a global world where
the affluent minorities are unequivocally committed to the fate of their fellow
citizens in deprived areas, those who are the bearers of intergenerational poverty
and inherited exclusion.6
In a context of growing complexity, linear cause and effect relationships seem
to lose their explanatory power. The cognitive frameworks left by the Age of
Enlightenment — the objective truth and the power of reason — seem insufficient
to attain the supreme knowledge that we all seek and do not find.
Ways of understanding our world, strictly based on a subject-object separation,
on the superior human capacity to dominate and control the ‘exterior’ reality, and
on the supremacy of technological reason and its pragmatic imperatives, have
ceased to make sense. On the contrary, the superiority of the subject-subject
relationship, the consequent emergence of a community of subjects, the
tropism towards non-fragmentary algorithms to deepen knowledge, and the emer-
gence of holistic and integral ways of examining complexity are new paradigms
that promise to speak to our inner core of meaning-making processes in a way that
the mere exterior and material reality of things cannot. So the challenge is to ask
how we re-think and re-enact the world in our lives in such a way that, instead of
thinking of the world as a collection of objects, we think of it as a communion
of subjects.
The subject-object split is the hallmark of the Enlightenment, the separation of
the self from the world. Science is founded on the conviction that in order to know
the world we must remain removed from our subjective human experience and rely
instead on objective, reproducible, impersonal data.This is a model of mastery and
expertise: the expert as subject, the world as object. This attitude postulates a
knowledge-rich education that could often end up in meaning-free learning. This
dichotomous way of understanding the challenges of our complex modernity has
profound implications on the means chosen to better know the world.7
The codified and authoritarian way of scrutiny seeks the incessant progress of
knowledge by means of control of the exterior reality. That which is not under the
control of the scientist cannot, by definition, be known and dissected. This is the
presumption in the school of today.
Alternatively, the tacit and inter-subjective way of knowing elicits participation
as a superior value (see Figure 1). Indeed, complexity is not compatible with
simplistic algorithms of knowing — and of communication — based on an atomi-
sation of knowledge. Our attention is progressively led to a better knowledge of the
whole as opposed to a greater knowledge of the parts. These are founding direc-
tions for the school of tomorrow.
Control
Knowing by
gaining control
Homogenisation
Fragmentation Abstraction
Alienation
Disappointment Hope
and fear and play
Participation
Knowing by
participation
Inclusion
Diversity
adaptive learning. Learning by doing and Doing by learning9 lead us to the key to
face an uncertain world and also the changing nature of work.
Learning to Live Together encompasses the extraordinary challenge to
rediscover a meaningful relationship, to raise the thresholds of social cohesion, to
make viable the sustainable foundations for community development. It contains
the core values of civic life and identity-building within a context of multiple
belongings.
The four pillars of learning set out the lasting foundations for lifelong and
lifewide learning in a scenario of a Learning Society.
Customised Communities
Learning
Society
Clockwork
Uniform Bureaucracy
Orange
• stage 1: product-oriented
• stage 2: consumption-oriented
• stage 3: client-oriented
• stage 4: innovation- and community-oriented
Is this a far-fetched dream? Can learning processes truly come alive? How would
flexible and network learning emerge as a paradigm shift in the story of education?
Six major thrusts in the changing patterns of education and learning can be
envisaged:
same
place
shift or
traditional year-round
school education
same different
time times
old-media flexible
distance learning
education
different
places
Technology steps in to empower both the learner and the educator and the
coming of age represented by increased personal sovereignty over space and time
affects both parties concerned in the learning enterprise. The prize-winning ques-
tion remains in knowing whether or not distance and flexible learning will further
empower the lifelong learner, particularly at the low learning end.
Can D equate LL? Is technology-enhanced learning narrowing the gap between
learning-averse people and learning-eager people? Will ICT eventually act as a
catalyser or, on the contrary, as a hurdle to slow pace and little motivated learners?
How can the disappearance of space and time encourage a further allocation of
individual resources for learning?
The lowering of physical barriers to the effectiveness of learning efforts is a
positive contribution to overcome the anxiety of learning.14 Furthermore, technical
solutions vis-à-vis LMS and LCMS are rapidly evolving into invisible or fading-out
A member is arriving: as she enters the room and finds herself a place to
work, she hears a familiar voice asking ‘Hello Annette, I got the assignment
you did last night from home: are you satisfied with the results?’ Annette
answers that she was happy with her strategy for managing forests provided
that she had got the climatic model right: she was less sure of this. Annette is
an active and advanced student so the ambient says it might be useful if
Annette spends some time today trying to pin down the problem with the
model using enhanced interactive simulation and projection facilities. It then
asks if Annette would give a brief presentation to the group.The ambient goes
briefly through its understanding of Annette’s availability and preferences for
the day’s work. Finally, Annette agrees on her work programme for the day.
One particularly long conversation takes place with Solomon who has just
moved to the area and joined the group. The ambient establishes Solomon’s
identity; asks Solomon for the name of an ambient that ‘knows’ Solomon;
gets permission from Solomon to acquire information about Solomon’s
background and experience in Environmental Studies. The ambient then
suggests that Solomon joins the meeting and introduces himself to the group.
In these private conversations the mental states of the group are synchronized
with the ambient, individual and collective work plans are agreed and in most
cases checked with the mentor through the ambient. In some cases the
assistance of the mentor is requested. A scheduled plenary meeting begins
with those who are present. Solomon introduces himself. Annette gives a 3-D
presentation of her assignment. A group member asks questions about one
During the day individuals and sub-groups locate in appropriate spaces in the
ambient to pursue appropriate learning experiences at a pace that suits them.
The ambient negotiates its degree of participation in these experiences with
the aid of the mentor. During the day the mentor and ambient converse
frequently, establishing where the mentor might most usefully spend his time,
and in some cases altering the schedule. The ambient and the mentor will
spend some time negotiating shared experiences with other ambients — for
example mounting a single musical concert with players from two or more
distant sites. They will also deal with requests for references/profiles of
individuals. Time spent in the ambient ends by negotiating a homework
assignment with each individual, but only after they have been informed
about what the ambient expects to happen for the rest of the day and making
appointments for next day or next time.
This scenario — and its underpinning technologies — stresses the fact that
learning is always a collaborative activity, involving strong interchange within a
community and between communities. These communities may be very broad,
spanning disciplines, but having a common purpose (e.g. working more effectively)
or related to a particular profession. They may be within a single (large) organi-
sation or span many organisations. Systems for individual learning for work will
therefore need to address issues of social interaction in a virtual world; the
automatic identification of communities of purpose within a population of learn-
ers; learner roles and behaviours; the creation and transfer of knowledge within a
virtual learning community; and the ownership of knowledge created by learners
within the system.
Team Learning, a ‘human technology’, emerges as key to the foundation of
learning schools.16 Through the discipline of group interaction and discussion, joint
learning can transform the collective thinking of members and compound the
value of metanoia by reaching out to other interconnected communities which are
equally engaged in the pursuit of meaningful change.
‘Have-nots’ ‘Haves’
Vaulting volatility marks our working context. The market puts a premium on
multicompetences and mobility. The spread of tele- and e-work calls on novel
self-management competences. Likewise, the central tenet of autonomy and self-
determination resorts to the critical issue of personal and vocational identity.
These questions do help us to understand the extent to which charting a
fully-fledged vocational identity is a formidable enterprise. Unless organisations
are identity enhancers they will fail to find the effective path towards collective
knowledge and community learning.
Giving credence to this pursuit, it is now possible to devise a theory on the
emergence of vocational identities, a sort of hybrid — homo sapiens cum faber.
Each human repertory at stake would necessarily include some, or all, of the
following features, with allowance for different combination patterns. Each par-
ticular combination reveals a specific stage in a developing vocational self:23
development, and the drive to learn is erratic. Intent is commensurate with voca-
tional identity; personal and professional fulfilment are its main outcome.
EDUCATION AS LEARNING
A RIGHT AS A DUTY
LEARNING WORK
OR AND
STUDY LEARNING
CREDITS CONTRACTS
There remains little doubt that unless a new concerted effort is put into practice
to produce a different social contract, tailored to serve the complex information
society and to make the most of the learning challenges, our societies will run into
growing difficulties. In this new contractual approach, the economy will go on
playing an important role; however, it is neither the sole nor the primordial factor.
Full citizenship standards, striking a right balance between duties and rights, will
increasingly call upon values such as justice, fairness, equity and solidarity in both
our national and international orders.
Conscious citizenship lies at the root of participatory democracy. Participation
demands a threshold level of social capital and trust capable of upholding higher-
order common purposes. This sphere of public interest surpasses the simple rights
of individuals to difference. This is the reason why democratic rule is at the heart
of citizenship education. Making allowance for a Learning Society is closely tied in
with deepening democratic beliefs and committing future generations to perfecting
democracy.
Schools and universities are — and have always been — bastions of sociality.
They are social institutions to the marrow and the seedbeds of societal governance.
Education establishments and educators are at the forefront of a new society. They
are the engines of a new world. They carry the prime responsibility of making
possible a better society: building the foundations of a new social contract that
elicits education, knowledge and learning as the key ingredients of a new deal.
In a cognitive fashioned society, knowledge carries the potential of becoming a
more powerful discriminator of human fate than in the former industrial society. In
other words, the premium awarded on knowledge and competences demands
better attention to those groups of low-achievers that are falling through the
loopholes of our basic education systems.
The quest for a new knowledge paradigm can not be separated from the goal
of a more equitable distribution of knowledge in societies.
learning within the policy process, including tackling denial, making space for
reflection, empowering the boundary spanners and practising innovation as learn-
ing. Referring to the report by the Delors Commission published by UNESCO in
1996 on education for the 21st century, ‘Learning: the treasure within’, Leicester
concludes that it is no longer possible for government to ignore the turbulence and
complexity of its operating environment: it needs to find its own ‘treasure within’.
We move from there into an exploration by Yves Punie of ‘Learning Spaces:
an ICT-enabled model of future learning in the Knowledge-based Society’. Based
on extrapolations from trends and drivers shaping learning in Europe, the article
also takes into account the broader perspective, envisaging and anticipating future
learning needs and requirements. Punie argues that the ‘learning spaces’ vision
puts learners at the centre of learning but, at the same time, conceives of it as a
social process and thus the potential of ICT-enabled learning spaces can only be
fulfilled when firmly embedded in a social and institutional context open to
innovation and supported by a favourable policy environment.
Paul Lefrère’s article on ‘Competing Higher Education Futures in a Global-
ising World’ focuses on the consequences for higher education of a globalising
world with access to capability-enhancing technologies and technological insights.
Following a discussion of a number of scenarios and trends in higher education, he
then takes the Middle East as a case study, asking the provocative question of
whether the challenge will not be ‘keeping up with Dubai’. Lefrère examines the
developments in the Middle East as an interesting test bed of scenarios for higher
education in general as this region is important both as a market for European
higher education and as a space where the competing influences of the US and
Europe are significant. The article explores the kinds of issues that may be at work
and the implications for European higher education policy.
The article by Jean Underwood, ‘Rethinking the Digital Divide’, examines the
impacts of student-tutor relationships. She starts from the observation that the
conceptualisation of the digital divide into the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, and
particularly the economically developed world as ‘high tech’ and the developing and
underdeveloped worlds as ‘low tech’, is no longer tenable.The purpose of the article
is to provide new definitions of what it means to be digitally impoverished or rich;
to identify mechanisms for achieving digital richness; and to consider the economic
and social equity issues which ensue for learners on either side of the digital divide.
In this context Underwood argues that the Digital Divide that is most important in
educational terms is that between students and their teacher. Quoting M. Prensky,
she poses the crucial question about whether the ‘Digital Native’ students should
learn the old ways, or their ‘Digital Immigrant’ educators learn the new ways.
Underwood concludes her article by drawing attention to the fact that the modes of
learner assessment currently in practice remain trapped in the book age and are
becoming increasingly inappropriate in the digital age.
Andy Hargreaves’ article on ‘Sustainable Leadership and Development in
Education: creating the future, conserving the past’ draws on research of thirty
years of educational leadership in eight US and Canadian high schools, as well as
on the literature on environmental and corporate sustainability. The article pre-
sents seven principles of sustainability in educational change and leadership devel-
oped by Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink and seeks to address questions such as:
How can we reconcile innovation and sustainability? How do we build a future on
the foundations of the past? How can the energetic innovator and the prudent
Puritan live and work together? He argues that while overconfident reformers are
prone to dismiss the past, those who are the targets of reform are inclined to
romanticise it, neither of which approaches responds to the real challenge. The
challenge for educational leadership, as he analyses it, is to consider that the past
is a subject for intelligent engagement which is connected to change and the future
through coherent life narratives.
Ilkka Tuomi in his article on ‘Learning in the Age of Networked Intelligence’
presents ten theses on future education and learning. He highlights emerging
trends that will shape educational systems, focusing on the impact on learning of
innovation economy and knowledge society. The article elaborates the changing
dynamics of production models since the first industrial revolution, arguing that in
the last few years we have been in the midst of a globalisation process that is
qualitatively different from the earlier ones. Tuomi describes recent developments
in innovation research and outlines a new theoretical view on innovation which
connects it with social change and learning.With a ‘downstream’ innovation model
highlighting the active and creative role of user communities in making innovations
real, there will be inevitable repercussions for educational institutions and learning
activity. In this context he challenges the policy-makers to reflect on why we will
need education in the future.
‘Building the Future of Learning’ is the subject of the article by LesWatson who
asks whether we have forgotten about buildings in the excitement about e-learning.
His article focuses on the need for new 21st century buildings and refurbished spaces
to reflect our educational approaches and philosophies. He argues that buildings
should combine educational ideas, with imaginative technology and architecture to
create the learning futures we wish to see and enable tomorrow’s ways of working
and learning. His article uses the Saltire Centre at Glasgow Caledonian University
as a case study to illustrate how some current key ideas in educational thinking can
influence the learning facilities we provide. The building, through its variety of
spaces, embraces learner differences and supports a concept of learning as a social
process putting human social interaction and conversation at its heart.
Part II of this issue includes two articles. The first on ‘Inter-Ethnic Relations
among Children at School: the perspective of young people in Scotland’ is by
Malcolm Hill, Catherine Graham, Catriona Caulfield, Nicola Ross & Anita
Shelton. The background is the many changes in recent decades in the policies
and academic writings about inter-ethnic relations with a growing focus on the
effects of different forms of racism and anti-racism. The authors note, however,
that relatively little research has been undertaken on the experiences and percep-
tions of children. This article therefore reports on findings from three linked
studies which highlight the viewpoints of white and minority ethnic children as
they made the transition to secondary schools.
The second article, by Geert ten Dam & Monique Volman, is on ‘Educating
for adulthood or for citizenship: social competence as an educational goal’. The
authors discuss the social competence students should acquire to participate in
society in an adequate manner. The focus is on social competence as an educa-
tional goal and on the question of how to evaluate the efforts of schools in
enhancing the social competence of their students. They explore the instruments
necessary to assess educational results in this field and, on the basis of a review
study, analyse the type of instruments currently available and the problems iden-
tified in measuring educational results in the field of social competence.
NOTES
18. Van Doren, C. (1991) A History of Knowledge, New York: Ballantine Books.
19. For an abridged presentation of punctuated equilibrium theories see:
Krugman, P. (1996) The Self-Organizing Economy, Malden, Massachusetts:
Blackwell Publishers.
20. Wilson, E. (1998) Consilience — The Unity of Knowledge, New York: Vintage
Books.
21. Whewell, W. (1967) The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences: Founded upon
Their History (The Sources of Science, No 41), Johnson Reprint Corp.
22. Carneiro 2003b, op. cit.
23. Carneiro 2003b, op. cit.
24. We use Jerome Bruner’s illuminating distinction between two critical land-
scapes in his analysis of the human condition: consciousness and action.
Bruner, J. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press.
25. Carneiro, R. (1999) ‘Achieving a minimum learning platform for all’, in
Agora IV, The low-skilled on the European labour market: prospects and policy
options, Thessaloniki: CEDEFOP.