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

Andreas Schleicher, OECD lifelong learning expert

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”