[ Overview of the Conference ]
[ "Learning in and for Participation in Work and Society" ]
A large and increasing proportion of the adult population of OECD countries now have at least completed upper secondary education. Many of these people have a learning habit and are so situated at work–with a supportive household in a community rich in learning opportunities–that they continue with structured learning throughout their working lives, and after. But of the remaining adults, many do not take advantage of vocational and other opportunities for structured learning. Either they are not moved to do so or they wish to do so but are frustrated by a variety of barriers to learning.
The conference focused on the still-large number of adults whose learning is most inhibited. On average, in the OECD, two out of five adults have less than upper secondary education, with the figure for individual countries ranging from one in seven up to four in five. On an alternative, adult literacy measure of the surveyed populations between one and three quarters failed to attain level 3, the minimum level for coping with the demands of modern work and life. Within this disadvantaged population, the conference focused on: (1) immigrants with poor language skills, (2) adults with few educational attainments, and (3) older adults. Practitioners, researchers, and members of the policy community reviewed together what is known about how such adults learn and the implications of this for the ways in which their learning can be enhanced. Their conclusions were surprising, exciting even. For a covert revolution is in progress.
In the early 1970s the OECD, UNESCO, and the Council of Europe all campaigned vigorously throughout their constituencies for a new model of education, variously described as Recurrent Education, Lifelong Learning, and Permanent Education. Despite some stylistic variations, all descriptions of the model shared certain basic characteristics. The model called for:
Over the intervening 25 years, implementation of this extraordinarily ambitious strategy has been piecemeal, very uneven across countries and, overall, it has failed. One of its original proponents (Kallen 1996, 21) points out that the liberating, emancipatory objectives of lifelong learning have made way for more realistic ones which buttress existing social systems. Most education systems remain almost as ‘front-loaded’ as before, with up to 90 percent of public spending concentrated into the first third of an average lifespan. Wherever it was enacted, paid educational leave has been emasculated. The diplomas of initial education and training still enjoy a quasi-monopoly over access to qualified employment. They correlate strongly with the level of earnings (e.g., Pugsley 1998, 3; OECD 1997a, 257–267), even in a country such as the United States, which is supposed not to have a qualification-driven labor market.
Kallen (1996, 22) judges that "the generous and encompassing concept of lifelong education as it was conceived in the early stages no longer fits the present-day, efficiency-oriented ‘no-nonsense’ market economies." He notes that the present times favor work-related "lifelong training" programs, preferably private and with little claim on public money; that "corporate learning" advances; and that the only major exception to the low-cost activism of governments is the financing of programs to draw the teeth of socially threatening problems.
The original lifelong learning agenda was too costly to implement, which is another way of saying that its goals did not win sufficient acceptance in competition with other priorities. Oil shocks and crises in public finances, and, more recently, deflationary policies to reduce public debt in Japan, the United States, and the European Union (EU) all provided a rationale for inhibiting the scope of reform. The feasible adult agenda shrank down to initiatives targeting certain highly vulnerable groups and improving the cost-effectiveness of provision.
There is no better illustration of the policy dilemma than the United States. In 1990 it adopted a typically inclusive national Adult Literacy and Lifelong Learning Goal that "by the year 2000, every adult American will be literate and will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship" (Pugsley 1998, 6). Against that, the International Adult Literacy Survey (OECD 1997b) shows that, while at least one quarter of the adult population of all surveyed countries have not achieved that level of knowledge and skills, almost 50 percent of the U.S. adult population had not reached this level by 1994–95. In 1996, only 9 percent of the 44 million Americans who do not have a high school diploma or equivalent were enrolled in adult basic, secondary or English as a second language programs (Pugsley 1998, 1).
The scale of the adult learning deficit—the gap between a prudent policy goal and the existing knowledge and skills of the adult population—varies considerably from country to country. But, given public priorities in OECD countries, it remains dauntingly large everywhere. According to the OECD (1996, table 8.16), adults in the labor force aged 25–64 who lack and therefore need the most basic education and training (having ISCED 0, 1, and 2) totaled 75.9 million across 18 member states (to take a few examples: 12.5m in the United States, 2.6m in Canada, 9m in France, 4m in Germany, 12.7m in Italy, 8.5m in Spain, 6m in the U.K., 1.9m in the Netherlands, and 1m in Sweden).
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
Arthur Hugh Clough, Say not the struggle nought availeth…
Relief is at hand because, unnoticed by the world at large, the promotion of adult learning is being reconceived and the way it is being done is being revolutionized.
The conference focused on the way that adults learn to better understand how this learning can be promoted among all adults, but, in particular, among immigrants facing a new language, poorly qualified adults, and the oldest workers as well as those no longer at work, for whom work-related purposes are less important, but for whom learning for social integration and leisure is more important. The researchers demonstrated the critical role of situation and disposition in adult learning; practitioners provided evidence of the numerous ways in which this understanding of the special characteristics of adult learning can be converted into new skills and knowledge, and therefore greater productivity, higher earnings, personal fulfillment, and social enrichment for the most marginalized adults.
Participants defined some key characteristics of this reconception:
Relative to individual learning, the importance of collective, day-to-day learning is better recognized incentives and motivators come to reflect the highly differentiated dispositions and situations of adult.
Young learners know far less than adults and are more homogeneous in what they do know. Their circumstances are far more similar than is the case with adults. Yet most strategies for promoting adult learning have not escaped the gravitational pull of the initial education model and gone to where the adults are. The young immigrant and the retired native are so different that situated learning will reflect this. It will be messy and the strategies to promote it will be fuzzy by comparison with those appropriate to the learning of young people. In a framework appropriate to the learning needs of adults participation would not usually mean enrollment on a course, as it still does in many cases. As Alan Tuckett and Werner Hermann both argued, there are far more kinds of participation and more contexts of learning than are commonly recognized. People do learn about the things they think are important, and they do a great deal of learning outside of formal instructional settings. Some of the simplest messages from researchers have the most profound impact on practice and programming—eventually.
In their papers and their interventions, participants spelled out the many ways in which adults also differ from each other, and the implications of these differences for the ways in which their learning can be promoted. Within the adult population there are major differences:
People even become more different from each other the older they get: "we are born as copies and die as originals." So Jim Greeno argued the importance of learning in context, of building knowledge on knowledge at work; Günther Dohmen illustrated the importance of developing into learning opportunities the particular interests of the elderly; and Tuckett argued for "systems which give adults permission to value what they already know and to learn where they are."
The structure of learning opportunities in our societies was likened to a three-legged stool. The largest and strongest leg, which tends to unbalance the whole stool, is the opportunities that occur within the initial education and training system. The second leg is company sponsored, (i.e., on-the-job and off-the-job training sponsored and often provided by employers). The third leg is sometimes less formal, the community-based learning opportunities, some of which are not instruction-led, such as Swedish study circles or the new wave of adult education initiatives in Germany reported by Dohmen.
The second leg is being transformed by a small but growing number of firms scattered throughout OECD countries. These are firms who have realized that knowledge or intellectual capital, comprising the capabilities of employees plus all the components of the organization’s capabilities–which do not leave the building at 6 o’clock—constitute the most important resource for them to invest in and to manage. For such firms, instruction-led learning fades into a useful but subsidiary means to develop the organization’s capacity to compete. The firm is reconceived as an organism which acquires potentially valuable knowledge from its competitive environment, (i.e., from suppliers, allies, customers, and competitors); teaches this knowledge, (i.e., shares it around the organization in ways which help those who can use it to do so); and finally creates from the knowledge business value (i.e., more competitive goods or services).
Surprisingly, this revolutionary anticipation of the full-blown knowledge economy did not figure in conference papers and discussions except for a few oblique pointers. Not only is the way that work is organized being influenced by the need to develop employee’s competencies continuously, but the firm is being reorganized as a learning/teaching collective.
The conference did give some consideration to the potential of the workplace as learning context for adults in need of basic skills. But it did not move from its potential for promoting individual learning to the critical interaction between individual and collective learning in organizations which are seeing themselves as knowledge acquirers, creators, and exploiters. Nor did it consider the impact of this revolution on employees with inadequate language or basic skills and on the oldest workers. The key features of this corporate paradigm shift are that:
The third leg is likely to be transformed by the paradigm shift from a didactic to an enabling strategy that was most vividly illustrated in Dohmen’s review of the ways in which learning occurs naturally throughout life’s practice. This is being developed and exploited in Germany as the basis for a permanently continued learning by the elderly. The characteristic features of the enabling strategy as outlined by Dohmen include:
According to one estimate, firms use only about 20 percent of their intellectual capacity on a day-to-day basis. According to Dohmen, experience with the innovative German programs to help the elderly to develop their knowledge and skills, demonstrates "the extensive, yet largely unexploited potential of elderly people." The developments in the company-based and the community-based ‘legs’ are clearly variants on the same revolutionary change or paradigm shift. In their different contexts, exploitation of the situated nature of most adult learning is at the heart of the shift.
Tom Alexander pointed out that lifelong learning needs to begin in the school systems, where Taylorism is alive and well. But Taylorism is going to be banished first from the workplace and from the community. It does not matter whether learning is for investment (the firm and its employees) or for pleasure (the community of elderly adults). The new paradigm depends not on scientific management, which economizes skills, but on releasing the creativity of an underdeveloped resource, whether this is a team of workers or a group of older people. The objective is release and empowerment rather than control.
As with most revolutions, there have been precursors among both the researchers and the practitioners. What is new, and was signaled by the conference, is that the shift to a new paradigm has achieved critical momentum and critical mass. It is no longer a secret movement espoused by the few. It is breaking cover.
The implications for practice, research, and policy are profound, and although some were half-addressed in passing, it will require a major intellectual and then logistical effort to address them at all comprehensively.
To take only one of the half-addressed implications, the marketing of such an enlarged and dispersed, activity-based learning movement will tax the ingenuity of the professionals. Marketing cues exist. Implied in the observations of one panelist, Paul Belanger, was a marketing strategy as diverse as the learning contexts that become the fulcrum for adult learning in the new dispensation. Raising basic skills in a ‘new’ workplace can be marketed in terms of productivity in the commercial economy as well as in terms of personal fulfillment, greater job security, and higher earnings.
At least as important, especially for adults with language deficiencies and for retired adults, is the rationale in terms of the social economy, of the quality of life in the household and the community. Tuckett pointed to the large numbers of adults who do not see themselves as learners but whose active learning is a necessary feature of any learning society. The marketing of an enlarged and dispersed adult learning movement has to be directed not just to those who can help to mainstream it, (i.e., to governments, employers, social organizations, and professionals), but also to the people who can make it an average, everyday reality, the adults themselves.
Many countries, not least the United States, have made real advances in recent years in improving access to what is basically old-style, instruction-led provision, but also in developing the use of new learning technologies—Crossroads Café, a U.S. produced video series serving limited English proficient adults in 35 states and 50 countries is a case in point. Practitioners and researchers in many countries have a better idea of what works than ever before. Yet overall effectiveness, and participation as traditionally conceived in traditional programs, remains low. The Crossroads Café evaluations (Intelecom 1998) show that nearly half the 21.2m foreign born population of the United States are adults with limited English proficiency, but in the last decade only 633,000 out of approximately 4.25 million such adults were served by English for Speakers of other Languages (ESOL) programs. The typical ESOL-enrolled learner was female (69 percent), 37 years old (mean age), Spanish speaking (46 percent), at least a graduate of a foreign high school (71 percent), a relative newcomer to the United States (mean time, 3 years), and unemployed (67 percent). Crossroads Café has been well received by instructors and learners. It has been shown to work as a way of reaching out to hitherto unreachable adults. Used purely as a distance learning program it can be as effective as classroom instruction with the same materials at a significantly reduced cost. There are institutional barriers, in terms of cooperation of local partners such as TV stations. but these could be tackled at program and policy level.
Yet the conclusion to be drawn is that technology by itself will not be the solution to the problem of the adult learning deficit. Its exploitation will greatly enhance access to and the effectiveness of instruction-based programs. There will continue to be an important role for traditional, classroom-based provision for immigrants seeking language competence and for adults in need of basic skills. Greeno and Hunt together suggest that the solution will be a messy plurality of approaches, including conversion, of the situations in which immigrants with poor language proficiency or unskilled workers or elderly retired adults find themselves, into effective learning opportunities.
Neither technology nor situated learning is a panacea. The revolution is not occurring because someone has discovered the educational equivalent of a wonder drug. What is new is that the professionals–who no longer need to be experts in instruction–are finally free of any addiction to instruction as the key to adult learning. The new professionals are people like Directors of Intellectual Capital and knowledge managers in firms, and Directors of Social Services and community managers in localities. The history of adult education is littered with programs that failed to reach most of their target group. There were generally several reasons for this, but one of the most common has been precisely this prejudiced attachment to a particular way of promoting adult learning. This prejudice removed, new and old professionals together are striking out with bold initiatives both at work and in the community.
The unusually high levels of participation in very broadly conceived adult education and training in Sweden (see Sohlman) or Japan (see Yamaguchi and Ohsako) were not shown to be a mechanical response to pressing needs. On the contrary, the three authors showed how profoundly the nature and availability of adult learning activities are influenced not just by history and culture, but also by very particular social values and convictions about the way work should be organized and social life structured. They also depicted changing societies, in which adults are seeking to alter their lifestyles; to live with more autonomy and greater cultural self-expression based on their own ideas and ability (Japan); and to find new ways to promote a learning-rich and more democratic environment in civil society or at work, which includes disadvantaged people with poor education, the disabled, and immigrants (Sweden).
The two-country case studies were striking testimony to the influence of a specific institutional and cultural context on the terms on which learning opportunities can be accessed and therefore who is "in" and who is "out." Cultural specificity itself creates "ins" and "outs" in multicultural societies. The effective exclusion of marginalized groups, including immigrants and retired people, was touched upon in various discussions. It underlined the importance and radical nature of one feature of the new paradigm, it’s reaching out impartially to every kind of situation in which all kinds of adults find themselves. More severely than before, implementation will test the commitment of countries to a genuinely plural, multicultural, and democratic way of life. It will challenge the permanent temptation not to strive too hard to lift immigrants and unschooled adults out of the pool of vulnerable and extremely cheap labor and the temptation to neglect the elderly as an unproductive, already-costly burden.
Jim Greeno drew attention to the large literature on ‘learning communities of practice’ which covers both paid and unpaid work as learning contexts. The attention of researchers
has been shifting to activity settings for learning, to ‘participating skillfully’ rather than ‘skills’ to ‘knowing’ rather than ‘knowledge.’ Far from being mere semantics, this marks a move to try to understand the activity [the black box of learning] rather than inputs or outputs, in other words to understand how adults learn.
Greeno saw whether at work or in the community, the dumbing down of work processes through modernized, technology-based versions of Taylorism as inimical to the learning prospects of the most marginal workers. The reason: extending the personal agency and responsibility of adults is found to be the most likely way to increase their learning through work. It has never been invariably true that ‘doing is learning and learning is doing.’ Anyone experienced in repetitive housework or on the assembly line knows this. The trick is to engineer paid or unpaid work so that it becomes a learning path for the worker without sacrificing work output.
Earl Hunt qualified Greeno’s paper in a number of ways, for example adding that it is important how adults use what they learn. Use of newly acquired skills and knowledge, and the conditions governing use are found to be major influences on motivation and perceptions, added Tuckett, and are at the heart of motivation. There is a good deal of general learning theory that applies to humans young or old. But there was wide recognition among participants that what was needed was a life-cycle theory of human learning which could comprehend not only the unchanging or general characteristics of human learning but also the major variables through time, as knowledge and life situations change. Hunt argued that there are anyway "major differences between young adult immigrants trying to learn the languages and skills required in a new country, young adults trying to repair problems in their own school education (e.g., by seeking a General Equivalency Diploma), middle-aged adults seeking retraining due to layoff and elderly adults taking courses for personal fulfillment."
Neurologically, child and adult learning processes may be fundamentally the same. But the circumstantial variables are numerous. The contexts of the learner are so different, perceptions, responses to stimuli and incentives, and objectives are so different, and the adult’s accumulated knowledge is so large and varied relative to the child’s, that the adult learner calls for a great range of customized treatments. Impartial respect for these specifics is clearly the key to far more effective promotion of adult learning. The general truths–that people learn best when they learn things with obvious applicability to their lives and things they want to learn–translate into as many different approaches as there are broad circumstantial variables.
Perhaps there is a perpetual tendency for a gap to open up between researchers and practitioners. The researchers, notably psychologists, select very limited data in order to distill out some quite robust generalizations. But in practice the specifics overlay the general and the practitioner, grateful for the generalizations, nevertheless has to find a way to deal with the specifics, for this is essential to effectiveness. What practitioners find may work for certain groups, or certain languages or even in certain countries. But so much is specific that it remains immensely difficult to identify what is general and transferable.
Three subgroups of the adult population were the objects of very detailed workshop discussions: adult immigrants with minimal language proficiency; adults lacking basic skills; and elderly adults (mostly over 55 years old), whose continued employability is at risk or who have retired. It is possible to pick out only a few themes from these rich and wide-ranging discussions.
Many of the problems for immigrants who need to acquire a new language are not technical. That is to say, effective instructional techniques for both classroom and distance learning exist. But the learning, which is desired and is technically feasible does not always occur. Sometimes there are obvious institutional problems. For instance, in federal states, of which the United States is only one example, the quality of English as a Second Language (ESL) programs can vary enormously from locality to locality. The country’s constitution gets in the way of nationwide quality assurance. But the nub of the U.S. problem is clearly shown in one evaluation of Crossroads Cafe implementation (Florida Evaluation, Intelecom 1998, 11):
The demand for English as a Second Language (ESL) education in the United States greatly surpasses the availability of instruction ... approximately 1 out of 10 Limited English Proficient (LEP) adults participated in ESL classes in 1994–95, about 1.3 million people in total, but nearly a quarter more, 3 million, expressed an interest in attending English classes but were unable to participate in programs. Work schedules, childcare, inconvenient locations, and transportation were all cited as barriers to attendance, but the primary reason was an insufficient supply of appropriate ESL services. Of the 3 million ... approximately half were 36 years of age or older.
Because distance learning in a key state like Florida is described as "largely an untapped resource" it might be thought that the problem is simply supply, the more so since the inappropriateness of available books and videos was cited as a key problem for basic skills adult education in other countries, like Mexico, where this, rather than immigrant language acquisition, is the major issue.
Unfortunately, it became very clear that this is not the case: That modern learning technologies are portable, asynchronous, and can be highly customized is a huge advantage. High and appropriate quality seems to be more difficult to achieve because of :
There are difficult and important technical issues, such as the role of native language literacy in relation to second language literacy. Practitioners in Australia, the United States, and elsewhere struggle with this and make good use of the output of researchers (see Cossío and Chou Allender). But there are other important issues where programs and policymakers have a major role that does not always sit easily with the practice and inclinations of researchers and practitioners. For example, it is a technical question how learning a new language affects identity and, through that route, learner motivation. But this is also a critical political issue in every country.
The cultural freight of every language is heavy, and adults are far less biddable than children or even young people. Many adult immigrants do not bring with them a strong orientation to abstract, school-based learning methods. Changing codes from informal, action-based learning, driven by instrumental goals to the dominant paradigm used in initial education can by itself be very difficult. Shock treatment, for example total immersion in a new language and culture, may severely damage self-confidence and self-esteem compared with transition to a new language where the learner has some influence over both the pace and extent of the changeover into a new register. There was much agreement that self-confidence and self-esteem are means to an end in such language learning, since far more is being learned than just a new language. Whereas the perceived attractions of a new culture may be a strong motivator to language acquisition for the young, for adults, whose cultural fundamentals are deeply rooted, the new culture may be a negative factor.
Good practice may be based on exploiting and respecting the immigrant’s own culture and language in order to manage motivation and help bridge the language/culture gap which has to be crossed. But it became clear in discussion that everything is not negotiable, that host countries have crunch points where immigrant cultural biases run counter to those of host countries as different as Denmark, France, and the United States, and that in a crunch it is the assimilation model, which dominates the liberal, multicultural model. The extent to which public policy asserts the (sometimes covert) assimilative model clearly varies over time and between countries. It may even be–but this is speculative–that there is, in general, a culture gap between practitioners (who are inclined to see themselves as enablers for immigrants’ objectives) and policymakers (who, in a crunch, will mostly reflect the majority views of the host community). In other words, the bicultural model of language induction cannot always be operated without political constraints that either limit resources or influence the curriculum.
In addition to the sheer scale of poor literacy among adults across OECD countries, it was striking that dissatisfaction with service quality is quite widespread and that many countries are not meeting the needs of massive numbers of adults with literacy problems.
There are significant variations between countries in the treatment of low proficiency adults, which are likely to affect motivation, and opportunity to learn at work. In some countries, such as Belgium, Ireland and the United States, lack of education is very critical to an individual’s economic health. In some other countries, notably Sweden, adults with poor educational credentials but relatively high literacy can do much better economically than in others.
In Sweden, the differences in earnings between high and low literacy levels are much smaller than in the United States, meaning that rewards for literacy are less. Yet participation in various forms of adult learning, which is one strategy for raising literacy levels, is much higher in Sweden. There are other powerful factors, which motivate adult learning.
Workshop discussion focused heavily on reasons for low levels of participation in instruction-based programs and on quality of provision. In the workshop on immigrants there had been just a little attention to the potential of work placements and use of the immigrant’s environment in promoting language development (e.g., Chou Allender). In this workshop there was even less attention to use of approaches other than classroom-based areas, although one instance was given by Stephen Reder of a case study firm which achieved systematic increases in skill levels, including those of the least skilled workers, after introducing direct rewards for skill acquisition.
Nancy Hampson from San Diego Community College offered a cameo sketch of her Adult Basic Education class with all the beguiling persuasiveness of a well-told anecdote. It did not matter that she knew best practice in everything from A to Z or that the college has really good career and counseling services. The big problem which trumped everything else was to get students to stay long enough and regularly enough to learn anything very lasting. The highest attendance level was about 40 percent of total class hours and under 5 percent of enrollees achieved that. Out of over 100 irregularly attending students only 18 percent were working and most were on public assistance. Entry level was set at below fifth grade (or U.S. National Adult Learning Survey levels 1 and 2), although reading levels ranged from 0 to 10th grade. Half of her students spoke English as a second language, but the class was not ESL and was taught in English. It was not surprising that she judged three-quarters of the barriers to their learning to be situational and institutional rather then dispositional. She regarded the title of Adult Basic Education to be in itself "a turn-off" compared with training for anything.
The researchers would probably agree with Hampson’s motto: "if they don’t learn the way we teach, let’s teach the way they learn." It was easy to see the complementaries between the teacher’s perspective and that of the researchers. One researcher (Reder) argued that, given the typically low intensity and duration of participation in adult basic education, it may be more effective to program "less in terms of discrete ability levels and more in terms of learning context (e.g., workplace, family) and longer-term learner goals (e.g., obtaining a GED, job advancement)." The entry level "might be focused on getting adult students into a logistically comfortable ‘track’ along which they can experience steady learning and progress towards their longer-term goals. The subsequent ‘level’ of instruction might involve adding new learning goals, expanding literacy-helping networks, and so on." Judith Alamprese suggested research priorities in basic adult education:
The workshop on unskilled, undereducated adults focused strongly on classroom-based basic education but reflected a growing appreciation of its inherent limitations and the need to capitalize on alternative learning contexts and on non-instructional approaches. The workshop on the learning of elderly adults saw the new paradigm on full display.
In the Nordic countries, three in four elderly adults seem not to participate in organized learning and almost one-in-four 70-year-olds in Denmark have expressed a need for organized learning which is not fully met. But much depends on how organized learning is defined. In Finland, Denmark, and Norway it appears to mean instruction-led learning. But in Sweden the teacher-less, self-directed study circles decide what to learn and how to do it, an approach which in certain respects mirrors good practice in a tiny number of companies with innovative human resource development practices.
The philosophy espoused by the Nordic Folk Academy and the Swedish study circles finds powerful expression in the innovative approaches in Germany reported by Gunther Dohmen. Here the conception of learning is of a lifelong and life-wide activity not only to survive and to prosper materially but also to construct a good life. It is upon this maximalist understanding of human learning that the emerging German paradigm of adult learning is founded.
One side of the new coin is self-direction, which may be self-direction of learning within a structure of opportunities and learning resources organized by others or which may include self-organization. It was curious not to pick up any references in the conference to research on private learning projects in Canada and the United States sparked off by Alan Tough in the early seventies (e.g., 1971), and therefore to the formidable research evidence of the capacity of the average adult for deliberate, sustained, self-directed learning.
The other, promotional side of the coin is enabling, which of course includes but is far broader in concept and practice than instruction. The German innovations fully accept that nonparticipation of older adults in classroom-based education does not reflect any lack of will or ability to learn. It reveals only a preference in many instances for "different, more self-determined and open learning forms," and the difficulty which elderly people from educationally or linguistically deprived backgrounds have with "the elaborated forms of communication and language that characterize most further education programs."
This position echoed Hunt’s emphasis on the importance of conditions which helps adults not just to acquire knowledge (see Greeno) but also to retain, recall, and use it. Many of the elderly fit Hunt’s description of most people as geared for action (what to do) rather than understanding (cognition). This is not to underestimate the importance of reflection, merely to stress the problem solving, action basis of much adult learning. These newer forms of learning in Germany tend to avoid dependency, to lean towards uncontrolled self-determined learning and to develop from and enhance informal opportunities arising from the real life surroundings of the elderly. This involves the same natural and often unconscious, (i.e., tacit learning capability which some of the most progressive firms in Japan, the United States, and Europe are beginning to recognize as one of their major intangible assets). Dohmen argued that its exploitation can transform the life of the elderly, not least the majority who will never be reached by classroom-based provision but who respond to opportunities to keep mentally fit by autonomous learning-through-doing and networking.
Again, it was recognized in the workshop and by Dohmen that implementation of an enabling paradigm has profound program and policy implications. Many of the same insights about adult learning, based on research and good practice, informed the Adams/Dansky presentation on ways of teaching the elderly using methods which are not replaced by but have to be incorporated within an enabling strategy. The new paradigm can only be converted into practice through far greater flexibility and variety of forms. The jury is out on whether the gross cost of this will be greater or smaller than current costs since "self-directed" does not necessarily mean "no public cost."
A life-cycle theory of learning implies policy levers which are appropriate both to stages in that life cycle and to the specific characteristic of subgroups, (i.e., to their circumstances and to their needs). Not only is it necessary to manage appropriate incentives and the conditions which frame individual motivation and choice, but it is essential to remove or influence the constraints on individual choice. The main focus of the conference was not on these implications for policy. But participants offered highly pertinent observations on some of these implications, and together their proposals would help to speed up acceptance of the new paradigm in more areas of adult learning and increase the density of innovative schemes that would convert concept into reality.
Implementation of an enabling strategy requires a major increase in flexibility at program level. Opportunities for learning are both exploited and created by the "new" firms throughout every aspect of the firm’s operations. Similarly, support has to be devised and put in place to enable immigrants to learn more autonomously beyond the classroom, through devices identified during the conference, (e.g., distance and open learning resources, mentoring, and self-help groups). The new learning technologies also have an important, and at present largely potential, role to play in helping adults to acquire basic skills and to continue and broaden their learning after retirement.
The Adult Education Initiative, which Sweden launched in 1997, is targeting individuals who have not completed upper secondary education as well as the adult unemployed. For, in spite of Sweden’s relatively high adult participation rates, one-quarter of all Swedish adults have a literacy level in the International Adult Learning Survey below level 3, the benchmark level for effective participation in economic and civil life. Individualized action plans and new teaching methods are seen to be necessary if the needs of reluctant adult learners with poor formal education are to be met. Devolution of responsibilities for provision to regions and localities and the encouragement of competition from nonpublic providers such as folk high schools are all intended to yield a wider and more attractive variety of provision to appeal to these highly vulnerable adults in their local circumstances.
Developing learning opportunities, learning stimuli, learning aids, and a dense infrastructure of learning-friendly services for the elderly, as envisaged by Dohmen, requires an integrated system and sustained effort from many professionals in addition to those who define themselves as adult educators and educational institutions. Declarative learning, the acquisition of skills and knowledge, which can be consciously recalled, is the characteristic product of the effective classroom. The new paradigm by no means despises the value of such learning. But its implementation also requires the patient construction of a learning-rich environment, which will promote the natural and holistic learning, which is part of everyday life. To engineer this environment for easy access and exploitation by low language proficiency adults, the unskilled, or elderly adults is the principal program and policy challenge.
Financial incentives such as rewards for specific learning outcomes or earnings premia for educational credentials have a role, greater in some countries than others, more effective with some people than with others. But participants were very clear that whatever is done to create a learning society from the supply side, by enriching learning opportunities, the motivation of adults to learn depends very heavily on nonfinancial factors. Policy and programming have to address these directly since they influence so strongly the will to learn.
This requires free and easily used information and counseling services to help people to take a realistic view of their capabilities and ways of achieving what they want, as well as to establish what support is available in the community or the workplace. Probably more important for adults is ownership or self-determination. It is a necessary condition of learning for many adults in many situations that they have a say, often the final say, in defining goals and planning ways to achieve them. The test of successful implementation of an enabling strategy is that control of what is learned, how, when and by who passes to the learners. When that happens self-direction has been realized.
The conference itself demonstrated the complex interactions between research, innovation, and practice, in which both researchers and practitioners may come to grips with the same ideas at the same time. Unfortunately, it was also clear that a good deal of relearning what has already been learned takes place, alongside much experimentation and local learning, but far less systematic learning in which the policy community can easily share.
In part, this is because there is often a gap between the answers which academic research provides and the questions which practitioners ask. Between researchers and practitioners a more systematic link is needed to help translate research for practitioners and practice for researchers, especially when a paradigm shift is under way. The outcomes of innovation are inevitably unpredictable and, as Ladislav Cerych argued, the only solution is a system, which permits continuous adjustment in the light of feedback.
There may be a need for a more formalized translation network and clearinghouse for adult learning when so many ministries, agencies, and organizations outside traditional adult education are engaged in promotion and support. The heterogeneity of implementation initiatives which follows inevitably from adoption of an enabling strategy will require a reliable and permanent system to reduce the amount of good research and innovation which is not grossed up, is diluted or even ignored.
Participants identified two difficult policy issues, which arise out of the shift to an enabling strategy and require urgent consideration. One is the issue of accountability and the other is marketing.
Where public monies are being spent there are a number of difficulties in establishing accountability. Some are inherent in the promotion of learning by adults. Nancy Hampson’s estimate that three-quarters of early terminations from adult learning programs were due not to dispositional barriers but to situational and institutional ones that would be less important for the young chimed with the experience of many.
Family and work responsibilities are not very predictable and can be insuperable barriers to learning. They can also lead to extremely unfavorable cost effectiveness evaluations compared with norms derived from initial education programs dominated by the young. This applies particularly to the most disadvantaged subgroups such as immigrants with low language proficiency and adults lacking basic education. Desirable outcomes such as basic language proficiency and basic educational competence will not have high valuations put on them if the benchmark is the scarcity of such outcomes in the whole population or their market value. More appropriate measures would be the extent to which the disadvantaged are set on a competitive footing in the job market and how well they are able to participate in the mainstream of society and undertake civic responsibilities. Whether or not a traditional or a newer form of adult learning support offers a good return to society depends heavily on the appropriateness of the performance measures which are built into programs.
A different kind of accountability issue does not relate so directly to program measures as to the freedom of practitioners to choose the most effective ways to help adults. Accountability is important. But the ever-present risk that the drive for accountability will rob practitioners of necessary latitude in deciding how to do their job is much increased as the promotion of adult learning moves beyond the familiar model of instruction-led learning into a wide variety of initiatives which enhance the learning potential inherent in everyday activities at work or in the community.
Measurement is no less important for consensus building and for effective marketing to those who control resources and manage learning contexts, and to adults themselves. Without measurable benefits innovation may not be credible to the policy community and the shift to an enabling strategy over more and more contexts of adult learning may be seriously inhibited. Positive results, which meet policy goals, have to be demonstrated in public programs.
However, participants envisaged a range of nontraditional measures which could be exploited to convince policymakers and adults of the wealth of desirable outcomes which are available.
Tom Sticht drew attention to the wide range of measurable multiplier effects of adult literacy that enable adults to have better (and more cheaply) educated children, to be more productive, earn more, pay more taxes, and be better citizens. Such effects clearly apply to programs for immigrants with minimal language proficiency and those for adults who lack basic skills. But in papers and workshop discussion it was also evident that positive results may be expected in the form of reduced health costs and care costs, and this is an important concern of the elderly. Ever since Jeremy Bentham’s felicific calculus the notion of any form of happiness indicator has seemed risible. Yet modern Japan still reveres Confucius and his dictum that "learning is pleasure;" and the United States is philosophically committed to a Jeffersonian "pursuit of happiness," (i.e., one which is more positive than the reduction of taxes). Personal fulfillment, collective self-help, civic involvement, greater autonomy, and a wider range of cultural activities are valuable outcomes from promoting learning by the elderly. Program evaluation has become mired in abstract constructs like "levels" and "equivalences" in order to facilitate cardinality. But the non-additivity of appropriate measures need not present great problems.
A quiet revolution is already underway among some groups of adults in a few countries and in a sprinkling of firms. To roll out this revolution it will be necessary to learn systematically from experience with what works and to apply these lessons widely in a way which has not been done in the past. To include the many millions of adults who are effectively excluded from lifelong learning opportunities requires a holistic strategy founded on insights from experience, for example:
The growing attention to learning, which is not led by instruction and is self-directed by individuals or by groups, is well illustrated by new ways of supporting the learning of elderly adults.
The enlarged concept of adult learning has a number of key features:
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This page last modified October 7, 1999. (lvb)