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story lifelong learning

The faster the world changes, the more lifelong learning becomes the key

Interview with Andreas Schleicher, OECD lifelong learning expert

Introduction

"I am neither an Athenian nor a Greek, I am a citizen of the world". The words of the philosopher Plutarchus came to mind during our conversation with Andreas Schleicher. This lifelong learning expert was born in Germany, studied in Australia, works in Paris and travels the globe as Director for Education and Skills at the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development).

In this position Andreas guides major OECD programs, including the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) and Indicators of Education Systems (INES).

Through his work and experience, Schleicher knows better than anyone the importance of lifelong learning. And at least as important: how we should stimulate it. The first step, says the expert, is to become a learning society. It was the start of a fascinating monologue.

Andreas Schleicher, OECD lifelong learning expert

Andreas Schleicher, OECD lifelong learning expert

The faster the world changes, the more lifelong learning becomes the key

The learning society

“We’re all born as lifelong learners. Toddlers don’t take anything for granted, they are willing to learn, unlearn and relearn. But when they get into school, we take away a lot of that capacity. We try to make them compliant. The issue of lifelong learning is not so much to accumulate new knowledge, it’s our willingness to unlearn and relearn when the context changes. And that’s the difficult part. We all get used to ways of working and thinking and habits. Suddenly, technology changes that and people need to adapt, for example to the current pandemic. The foundation of a learning society is the curiosity, the interest, the willingness, the capacity to learn on your own early on.  

Another pillar of the learning society is that we need to become better at recognizing learning. We have made our systems very lumpy. You learn and learn and learn to get a degree, and you think that will last for many years. We are not very good in recognizing small incidences of learning. We recognize people by their past, by their degrees, not for what they can currently do. There are many learning opportunities in adult life, but we are not good enough to build a sort of intrinsic foundation for it.

This intrinsic foundation is built by learning itself. We give youngsters too little opportunities to learn themselves. We have made the lives of children more and more scripted. When I was a child, I could go out and play, take my own risks, but today we have all micromanaged the lives of children. We’ve taken away that room for experimentation.

And that’s what learning is all about, it’s not only about absorbing. We’ve made learning too much a process of consumption, opposed to a process of experiencing. Technology has made learning so much more consumption-oriented. You become very reactive towards stimulus on the screen.”

“The issue of lifelong learning is not so much to accumulate new knowledge. It’s our willingness to unlearn and relearn when the context changes.”

Andreas Schleicher sees major differences between countries in terms of lifelong learning. These differences are often rooted in the mentality of the working population itself.
 
“In some countries almost 70% of the population says that they won’t take or don’t need the opportunity to learn, even if the government pays for the education. There is enough training from the part of the suppliers, but people lack the insight that learning is obliged to be able to evolve these days. In the past, we learned to do the work, and now learning is the work. Truck drivers are great examples of this. You have many ancient companies who are quite keen to move up the value chain and to adapt from transport to logistics, but yet they don’t find enough people willing to take that challenge. As people, we always have to make choices between the present and the future. Those are the hardest choices for people to make, financially, environmentally, everywhere. And learning is just a very good example. You have to make an effort today to build a better future. We have to work on making learning more fun, rather than destroying the energy of people to reinvent themselves.
 
One of the things we can do to change this mindset is changing our qualification systems. By creating an independent qualification structure, we could recognize a lot of talent that we otherwise won’t be aware of. You’d be surprised how many people have amazing skills that nobody knows about, because they don’t know themselves. Those systems are easy to build, because technology provides amazing solutions for that. Take immigrants, for instance. They end up in cleaning jobs, because we have no sort of passport that lines up their skills’ profile. Give them tools to test their skills, tools to see what the requirements for certain jobs are and then they can see where their profile fits best and what they should invest in. That’s an idea that we can work on starting today, building a qualification structure that motivates people to invest in their skills. Because they know if they do, something is going to come up for them. It will help the employers and inflexible labour markets of today to bring the huge skill potential of all kind of marginalized populations to the market.

Another important part is to get a lot more creativity into our learning environments. To give people the opportunity to take ownership for their own learning, so they can decide themselves how, when and where they learn. It’s also key to give teachers and educators ownership, to give them more space to become innovators.

Some regions in China created a lot of room for this entrepreneurship among the teaching population. For example, they created a digital platform where teachers could upload their ideas for projects, combined with reputation metrics. The more other teachers started to use your lessons, evaluated them and developed them further, the more recognition you get in the education system. So at the end of the school year, your principal would not only ask: “how well did you teach your kids?”, but also: “what contribution did you make to improve the education system?” So as a teacher you became a lifelong learner, you became the education system, not a little wheel to transmit fabricated knowledge. This way the government created a great curriculum, because it was designed by the best, most recognized and respected teachers. It was very simple, but very effective to get people to take responsibility for learning.

Another example: vice-principals of high performing schools in China were asked to become temporary principle in a poor performing school somewhere else in the country. If they succeeded to lift the level of the school, their temporary appointment became permanent.

So they got the best people in the most difficult places.

“We have to build a qualification structure that motivates people to invest in their skills.”

These simple things created a more open, entrepreneurial environment. For the moment, we are putting too much effort in pushing ideas into educators and students and we do too little to find the good ideas and to scale and spread them.”

The dilemma we are facing

Technology is changing society, and is therefore changing education. This will be the case in the future even more than it is today. And that also has an impact on lifelong learning, according to Andreas Schleicher.
 
“Labour markets are going to become much more skill intensive. We will become better at matching people’s skills with jobs. At the moment, there is a lot of friction and imperfection, but I think labour markets will become increasingly better in figuring out what talents you have. It will work well for those who are well-prepared and the faster the world changes, the more lifelong learning becomes the key. Those who are capable of this, will be super powerful in everything they do. But you will also see a lot of people who have not acquired those foundations.

The polarization today in our society is about money. In the future, it will be about human capabilities. The biggest form of exclusion in the future is not going to be economic exclusion, it’s going to be social exclusion, and that is very much related to the capabilities of people to keep up.

story lifelong learning

You are not just looking at other people, you are also looking at technology. You are becoming the designer or the slave of an algorithm. That’s the dilemma we are facing.”

Lifelong learning

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Gemmeke de Jongh
Gemmeke de Jongh
International Association Expert
+32 2 504 03 78
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