Martin Yarnit
A common problem with books based on academic conferences is that the contributors, in their enthusiasm for their own specialist theme, sometimes seem indifferent to the big issues. Longworth and Osborne, tireless toilers for the concept of the learning city and region, pinpoint a vital truth that they, almost alone amongst the contributors to Perspectives on Learning Cities and Regions[1] are preoccupied with:
...regional management is simply not aware, neither of the nature of the challenge nor of the opportunities that exist, to move forward. Learning cities and regions, however urgent they may be to their economic and social survival, are simply not presently at the forefront of local and regional authority priorities. (p.233)
In a series of books, Longworth, Osborne and the other founders of the international Pascal network have pointed to the stark challenges facing cities on every continent:
- the struggle to absorb, integrate and service waves of migrants from the rural interior – in the south – or from poorer countries – in the north
- the need to reduce carbon dependency whilst sustaining growth and innovation
- the urgency of re-designing urban government to take account of increasing diversity and inequality.
These are the issues that Longworth and Osborne want to address in this book but most of the contributors have their gaze firmly fixed on more mundane questions. So the editors are largely alone in wondering why the learning city idea has so little purchase with local and regional power brokers.
Part of the reason is obvious: the very name suggests something that will be of interest to educationalists alone. That would not be a problem for the contributors to this volume who in the main either belong to the educational community or have adopted its language and habits of thought. Above all, they are without exception academics in higher education. That is not to say that the Pascal network is homogeneous; some of the founding members were regional and local agencies that understood the significance of the learning city and its potential benefits as an organising framework. But the concept has, as the authors suggest, had little appeal for, for example, heads of economic development, with a few notable examples. This may be why the UK Learning City Network, following a period of rapid growth, fell into terminal decline.
But there is another reason why the learning city has lacked a broader appeal for government agencies and their partners. It is because in some respects they were actually doing what Longworth and Osborne (and I) would like them to do, but using a different language and different set of symbols. This paradox is easily illustrated by a couple of examples.
Oldham, after the so-called race riots of 2001, and under the visionary and forceful leadership of the principal of the town’s sixth form college, Nick Brown, has carved out a clear strategy for economic development and social cohesion, using education as a growth engine. The aim has been to make Oldham a regional centre for science education, underpinned by better schools and a rich cultural offer. The vision has been carefully designed to win the commitment of Asian and White British families, alike. Yet, if Google is a reliable guide, nobody refers to Oldham the Learning City.
Another example, from Brazil, is Sao Paolo, the seat of the successful experiment in participatory budgeting that is currently been trialled by a number of English local authorities with government blessing. Sao Paolo, the largest city in the southern hemisphere with 11 million people, is a member of an international network, the Global Cities Alliance, linking cities in Brazil, Italy and Mozambique, with a focus on learning the lessons of urban development and poverty reduction. Again, there is no reference in Google to Sao Paolo the Learning City.
Cities everywhere are grappling with big issues about cohesion, diversity, climate change and globalisation. This requires an intense collective feat of reflection, problem solving, negotiation and, yes, of learning even if that term is rarely used by the participants. Those of us who have helped to promote the idea of the learning city have to set aside our carefully designed frameworks and toolkits and get to grips with the learning journeys that cities have embarked on, using the language they understand if we are to have something useful to say in the future.
If we can find the concepts and language to make sense of those journeys in terms that make sense to local and regional policymakers we make find that we can engage with them to identify and to apply practical lessons. Of course, the lessons may be – as in Oldham’s case – about the role of the education infrastructure in promoting equitable and sustainable development. They may be, as in Liverpool’s, about the social and economic impact of the expansion of higher education interlinked with the City of Culture project. Whatever the path, the crucial thing is an active and inclusive process of reflection that involves educationalists – amongst others - but is not seen as their property. My instinct is that it would be better not to call that a learning city. As to what it should be called, I’m afraid I can’t offer a better alternative this week.
Comments
Dear Martin,This is a very
Dear Martin,
This is a very helpful response and some of these issues are being picked up in our EUROlocal [3] project and analyses that we have been doing of the UK position in particular. I agree entirely that there are many initiatives that have the characteristics of what have been described as Learning Cities/Region in a systematic way by people like Ron Faris, but don't use that nomenclature. The reverse is also true in some countries where the label is used without any real meaning.
We are soon to launch an audit across Europe to try to determine more systematically what is happening and we'll make sure that you see this. it will be announced on this site.
Thanks for taking the time to post this and I hope others join the debate, Mike
Dont be too pessimistic Martin
Thank you Martin for your provocative yet necessary contribution. My feeling is that learning cities are not dead as Dodos, but rather in a phase of metamorphosis towards a new and broader incarnation. The challenge is to advance a conceptual and policxy evolution in line with the radical changes in the context and environment of cities.
It is,of course, paradoxical, as you note, that the need for lifelong learning and visionary enterprise in cities has never been greater for the reasons you cite, while the high noon of learning cities in countries such as the UK appears to have waned. I would add to your list of big issues the rapidly growing urbanisation in countries such as China, India, and most of Africa.
I wonder, however, whether we are too Euro-centric in coming to judgments on whether learning cities are as dead as Dodo. A recent UNESCO International Forum on Conceptual Evolution and Policy Development in Lifelong Learning [4] held in Shanghai in May 2010 provided diverse perspectives on lifelong learning and learning cities across a range of Asian and African coutries such as China and Korea where governments have taken a policy position in mandating lifelon learning. This may lead to a different development trajectory to the familiar European pathways where all too often conditions make for inertia and conservatism.
Hence, I see much value in fostering an active North/South dialogue on lifelong learning and learning cities in the new PASCAL International Exchanges [5] (PIE) project [6]. PIE is still at an early exploratory stage of development, and we are learning how to build an online international dialogue. I would very much welcome your contribution to issues raised in the PIE stimulus papers and other documents. For example, PIE Discussion Paper 1 [7] on Building 21st Century Sustainable Learning Citiies offers some perspectives on sustainability that should be debated. PIE Discussion Paper 2 [8] takes up the central question of making learning cities creative and innovative. I would welcome your comments on issues raised in these papers that may be of interest to you.
Man is a social animal as a recent bestselling book by David Brooks reminds us We need, then, to be creative in finding social and community solutions to the myriad of issues confronting cities, and share our ideas and experience across the world regardless of location. Global citizenship needs to complement local citizenship. I hope you will join us in the PIE dialogue in finding new ways to move responses forward in ways that balance a necessary "glocalisation" - a deep knowledge and concern for the individual community combined with a global understanding and citizenship.
But history shows us that...
But history shows us that it is the educated people, and the institutions that generate these educated people (planners, architects, lawyers, politicians, economists, etc) that have created the mess with the unsustainable cities that we now have.
The argument that there is no limit to human creativity is fundamentally flawed because under this principle it’s the human that is behind the steering wheel. Humans are a narcissistic self-indulgent species to quote David Suzuki. Perhaps its time the ‘learning city’ learnt from others on this planet (some of which incidentally have been here for much longer) rather than from the very folk that got us into this mess! But we must go beyond the thoughts of Suzuki on biocentrism where what humans do is fundamentally connected to nature in all its myriad ways. There are others (not just the inanimate) on this planet that we should be learning from (not learning about) about sustainability and as a result what we do about human habitat in cities.
That’s my sixpence on this!
Steve
Yes you are right: but what do we do?
Dear Steve and Jarl
I found your comments very interesting and pertinent. The notion of a Runaway World was well argued by Anthony Giddins in the 1999 Reith Lectures, and in a number of respects the trends identified by Giddins have accelarated since 1999. In looking for responses, as we must, it is worth considering some of the proposals Giddins brought forward. These centred around what he termed a deepening of democracy-democratising democracy which he saw requiring a strong civic culture. He rightly observed that markets cannot produce such a culture so that we must look carefully at how to promote the role of civil society, including the family and other non-economic institutions such as cultural institutions.
This of course links with the current Big Society debate in the UK and I suggest that PASCAL should invest intellectual resources to the question of how to strengthen the role of civil society and foster the values and culture that you both point to in your comments. This is very pertinent to the objectives of PIE, and I hope that you will both contribute to progressing the PIE dialogue in these directions. This intellectual underpinning is needed to give direction to the PIE agenda. Some effective grassroots initiatives with a democratic orientation, such as the Hume Global Learning Village, already exist within PIE. These can be built on as a process of democratising democracy and fostering long term sustainability.
Values and culture matter of course so that it is worth considering the observation by Daniel Patrick Moynihan: " The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." Did Moynihan get it right?
What UCL is saying
Dear All,
You might be interested in a short opinion piece by the Vice-Provost for research at University College London in the THES two weeks ago on the need for universities to recover those historic elements of mission so vital for the maintenance of a vibrant civic polity.
See The secret to saving our universities [9] (Times Higher Education, 14 July 2011).
Kindest
Jim
A Sisiphyllian Task
Dear Jarl,
I agree that governments (most especially in times of perceived austerity) appear unwilling to support such humanising endeavours. However, it is worth remembering that Land Grant universities in the US and Plate Glass 60s universities in the UK were founded at different times and contexts where our collective resources were much fewer than is the case today. I think that when someone like Price, from one of the largest and most prestigious institutions in the UK is prepared to back this agenda it is incumbent on all of us involved to continue to press even if the task appears Sisiphyllian.
Kindest
Jim
Universities and Wisdom
In difficulty times universities faced particular tests – of identity, purpose and moral fibre as much as in financial capability and entrepreneurialism. The debate should be about vision and clarity of purpose, and about the will and determination, of academe and especially its leaders and opinion-makers. As to ‘teaching wisdom’, mostly this is really about curriculum, and still very much under the control of at least the leadership of the UK university, and not even a big budget commitment.
Have we sold ourselves short to win favour with utilitarian governments, whereas we should be seeking a wider and fuller meaning of ‘utilitarian relevance’ for the future and the whole society? Adult education made much the same mistake in playing the vocational utility game in order to retain financial and favour, couching its social equity objectives in economic ‘waste of HR’ terms, then finding itself defined as about no more than VET and skills for jobs.
Looking at the news this week, at home and abroad, the paradigm shift towards new purposes and greater wisdom, if it occurs, will be in the wider society, and about its survival by being wiser. More often than not higher education follows rather than sets values and directions.
This wider picture suggests that increasingly support for – and pressures on – universities to speak in this way, as the multiple problématique of fiscal, economic and ecological crisis shouts at us and at governments to govern better. Universities tend to be cautious and self-seeking, some might say even venal. A lead from prestigious UCL and its talented Provost Malcolm Grant is very welcome.
For a dampening dose of reality read also the comment in the succeeding blog discussion: “We have too many universities at the bottom of the league table where what Professor Price says is not true. Hence rationalisation in this cluster is the only answer to put more funds into the top universities.” Here competitive dog-eat-dog greed reasserts itself. It is foolish and self-seeking arrogance to believe that wisdom only resides within wealth and research intensive universities - what a display of lack of wisdom. Higher education is up against this enemy within, as much as neo-liberal and short-sighted governments.
Blind Refereeing
It would be very interesting to blind referee teaching and scholarship across the spectrum. Having taught in both types of institution I saw many examples of excellence in the small, 'more parochial' liberal arts university college in which I started in HE and many examples of errant stupidity in a large research intensive institution. Of course critical mass offers power and diversity and that is not to be sneezed at but it does require careful consideration as to whether critical mass on its own is any guarantor of quality. It seems to me that what is needed most and lacking most is a combination of wisdom and graciousness – the wisdom to chart a way forward and the graciousness to engage others in stepping out into the unknown.
Higher Education v Training
It seems common parlance these days to talk about teaching and learning in universities. I see this as a mistake and we should go back to talking about higher education to make the distinction with training which also is about teaching and learning. The difference between education and training of course is that one should be equipping you for dealing with the long run problems of the wider world (society, the environment, economy) and community and its future, whereas training is to equip you to fill an immediate and short term labour market demand of a specific nature. Unfortunately, this blurring of function by some universities in the name of articulated pathways has given impetus to the factory model of higher education.
Education makes you fick innit?
Those of you intersted in Steve's distinction between education and training should check out Education make you fick innit? [10] by Martin Allen and Patrick Ainley.
"It explains how allegations of ‘dumbing down’ and deskilling contrast with claims of rising standards for a world class workforce, showing how education has become the main means of social control in an increasingly divided and self-destructive society. Rather than emancipating the minds of future generations, education forecloses their possibilities. In this sense, Education Make You Fick, Innit?"
"The main argument of this book is that the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of all this education cannot be explained simply in terms of the inadequate design of its internal structures or through problems with implementation, even if nobody should question the fundamental importance of these areas. It connects changes
in education and training and the relation between them to wider changes in society. Particularly important is the vexed question of social class and its recomposition over the last half century. This affects also the altered gender balance of occupations and relations as well as the situation of various minority ethnic groups. All are involved in perennial debate over the place of the vocational compared with the academic."
Links to PUMR
Dear Colleagues,
This fascinating debate was the reason I suggested the PASCAL Universites for a Modern Renaissance (PUMR [11]) programme. The many papers I have written on this cite Steve Garlick and others of like mind who want universities to bring a new pragmatism to the set of values society is crying out for. If universities cannot show a lead in this, who can? So my hope is that PUMR is of its time and we in PASCAL are ready to help. Over the next few weeks look on our part of the web-site and add your views to our richer view of how we can help
Kindest regards
James
Complex historic purposes
Dear Steve,
While I assent to your claims about blurring we also need to take account of the complex historic purposes of universities (where blurring has always been part of our lives). Universities were often deeply utilitarian in preparing people for church ministry (in various guises) and civil service. In that sense there has always been something of the factory in them. The challenge, has always been that Universities are also the progeny of productive surpluses whether these are by the agrarian and trading surpluses of Alexandria or the residue surpluses of 19th and early 20th century industrialisation in late (post) industrial societies such as Britain and the US. As the surpluses reduce year on year and the balance of surplus shifts the traditional liberal model (itself a function of surplus in the Greek City State or London) comes under increasing strain. The task is to illustrate how the fruits of surplus actually enhance the lives of people in a way that recognises the twin imperatives of maintaining those surpluses that secure the future (through economic means) and nurturing flourishing for all- something that has been 'abundantly absent on English Streets this week. It does seem to me, and I'm always open to correction, that the only way to do so is maintain the higher order entailments of complexity. To understand particular social, cultural, economic problems as enormously complex may offer something to understand the particular in its singularity. To teach folk to deal with the particular will never enable them to grasp the complexity. Lessons from literacy strategies are instructive here. We spend a lot of time getting students to be functionally literate and there they remain-functionally literate. However, were we to invest as much pedagogic/androgogic effort in getting them to engage with and love literature they will undoubtedly be functionally literate, but will also carry forward into their private and public lives a surplus of meaning and understanding.
Hope this isn't too convoluted.
Kindest Jim
Beckham v Mandela
Indeed James, not convoluted at all. We tend these days to value and hold up (even in celebrity) the ‘expert’ in some narrow discipline rather than the broader notion of wisdom that can benefit (flourishing) in many less obvious (i.e. more complex interconnected) ways and where as you say the ‘surplus’ is not quite so apparent to the simple observer in that instant of time as opposed to something over the horizon. The London riots, and of course the problematic of ‘lost’ youth generally, may be a product of this celebrity now fetish we seem obsessed by. Every one wants to be a David Beckham with one very simple skill (and my wife says he’s not particularly good looking despite what the tabloids might portray!) with a football as opposed to a Ghandi or Mandela who had such fundamental impacts on society that were not recognised at the time…but with hindsight, something more valuable and lasting. But who contributes more to the surplus now…Beckham…and tomorrow’s surplus…Mandela et al.
Best wishes
Steve