PIMA Bulletin 22

The PIMA Bulletin Number 22 for January 2019 can now be read in full below.

The crisis in Western democracy [1] was an early attempt in PASCAL via the OTB [2] (thinking outside the box) Observatory website facility, to promote discussion of the way that assaults on democracy (not only ‘western’) might be confronted. What is the response that lifelong learning (LLL) and its encompassing moral and political values might have to offer in reviving active democratic practice?

Things have meanwhile moved on, but not in reassuring directions. Many countries now experience disillusion, or worse, with their own and others’ politics and political parties. Globally there is I believe more new repression than illumination of how to think through and live more equably and well.

The PIMA Bulletin periodically reissues a chronic unanswered challenge to educators and social planners over LLL: are we so preoccupied with our own institutional and professional wellbeing, often using arcane language and part-closeted discourse, that we don’t see where learning and education come in?  Do we notice the power and damage that public and private sector agencies at all levels, aided by sometimes viciously misused mass and social media, inflict on the identity, self-confidence, inherited morality and wisdom of ordinary people?  Is not our mission to support learning – directly by purposeful education for all and indirectly by sustaining suitable cultural, social, healthy, sustainable public and shared space and environment – such that individuals and communities can contribute and flourish?

In this issue, two themes precede a diversity of other news and views also relevant to our international network. Both continue earlier dialogue-for-action. Both will continue during 2019. The first is about crisis of democracy in Europe, specifically in this issue also within France. Both it is hoped will provoke other views and reports from the hearts and heads of readers. The second, with a sequel to follow, will attempt to answer its own question: what should educators be doing about it?

The other theme arose from PASCAL’s Korea Suwon [3] gatherings in the third quarter of 2018. It was introduced by the PIMA President in Bulletin No 20, October 2018. It is about a now often mentioned but little analysed dimension of ‘lifelong’ learning: that is life-deep. This has joined LLL and life-wide in our lexicon. It was long since remarked by Martin Yarnit that elements of ‘LLL’ and ‘Learning City’ were more often practised in cities than the terms were understood or even used. We decided to explore here what life-deep means to different network members rather than simply adopt in un-thought-through practice.

These two themes may appear to be worlds apart. One is locked into macro-politics and political economic and ideology. The other perhaps just probes what individuals experience and believe within themselves. But take note: ‘lifelong’ may not mean long-sighted; one can learn all through life but not manage to take a long view – for example over where neglect of participatory democracy leads.  So it is not so simple: it becomes evident in this first anthology that life-deep refers to the group and community as much as to individual learning. Conversely, for many in our network the grander discourse about democracy comes to life less in national parliament, politics and process than in local ‘communitarian’ face-to-face ways; as this Editor, for example, finds in the local community and small town in rural France. Whether and how far these two strands of theory put to work in practice connect and mutually inform may emerge in subsequent dialogue.

The previous Bulletin No. 21 [4] was turned over mainly to the theme of Later Life Learning. This and our other current ‘special interest’, the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs, will also reappear through the year’s Bulletins, with some further learning-for-action ripples from the Suwon Conference. Readers may therefore find it profitable to save to their own records sequential PIMA Bulletins, to be able track these and other threads important to our work and living. They can also all now be found in the online Library of the Observatory Website.

All the articles above are featured in full in the Bulletin below...