The PIMA Bulletin Number 20 for October 2018 can now be read in full below.

The Leader of the Opposition in the UK addresses the annual Party Conference not as ‘members’ or ‘ladies and gentlemen’, but as ‘Conference’. This may sound strange in an age of competitive individualism. Is the whole really more than the sum of the parts?  Does something called Conference, or Party, or Membership collectively, learn, think and act as a collectivity? What about a Learning City? - or Community? - or PASCAL itself?

The 2018 PASCAL Annual Conference in Suwon, South Korea was, to many who took part, a vigorous and successful affair, with reportedly the largest number of participants in the Observatory’s history. Last month Observatory Chair Josef Konvitz published a thoughtful and upbeat analysis on the PASCAL Website, as did Denise Reghenzani a little later of the contrastingly smaller also partly experiential PIMA Seminar which followed in Beijing. Here we look at the Suwon event instead through the eyes of five different participants, from five different countries, to uncover some of the diversity of learning and different possible follow-up action that also took place.

The question remains: did ‘Conference’ and its co-sponsors, a Korean Learning City and an international Observatory, learn as intelligent agencies that reflect on experience and adapt accordingly? For this participant a peak challenge and possible collective learning experience came early, with coincidentally connecting keynotes from Korea and South Africa which raised just such a question in relation to learning and action in the face of chronic global crisis. It was as if a challenge at that moment for new ways of seeing and acting was presented, shared and perhaps ‘Conference’-owned. If so, this new perception or paradigm was apparently left in abeyance; ‘Conference’ then returned to business as usual.

Peter Kearns also issued a ‘challenge to the Suwon Conference’, the subject of which, new demography and later life learning (LLL), is taken up in this Bulletin issue. It remains to be seen whether this well canvassed challenge – one of the three Suwon strands – is taken up via the LLL Special Interest Group and in other ways.

The Bulletin has explored and periodically probed another challenging question: the future or fate of ‘Western democracy’; or maybe we should say liberal participatory democracy for and through active citizenship. Notice it or not, it is a dominant theme in much global and national political news, out in that wider political world where if it is to have meaning and validity, lifelong learning must demand attention and action. In this issue Rajesh Tandon connects with the older ‘western’ tradition, but puts the question to his own country, following visitor Chris Brooks’ Will India Inspire the 21st Century? in Bulletin 19. We welcome further contributions to this theme from any part of the world.

The previous Bulletin No. 19 also focused on China, a rising power in economic terms but also in terms of other innovative and leading roles in the Chinese or Asian 20^th century. Here Hans Schuetze, formerly of the OECD and now professor emeritus at UBC Canada, reflects critically on the rise of PRC since he first visited post-Maoist China in 1984 for the conference featured in Bulletin 19; especially from the point of view of the character and role of universities. It is a subject particular to China yet universal to all countries, and deserves sustained Bulletin attention, from macro global rankings to micro curriculum design and delivery.

In other sections we hear from Tom Schuller in the UK about his adaptation of the ‘Peter principle’ via The Paula Principle as to why women lose out at work, and what needs to be done about it. Yahui Fang reports on participatory action research on community-engaged curriculum design in higher education in Taiwan, and Bruce Wilson updates us on the OECD Jean Monnet initiative through the RMIT Melbourne Australia EU Centre to see Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) implemented in Asia Pacific. Finally, after celebrating the life and regretting the passing of great Australian community educator Glen Postle, we welcome ten new members into PIMA membership, including a significant contingent from Thailand.

All members, early and recent, are equally welcome and equally encouraged to send items of news, and views on matters of interest such as are raised in this issue: send anything from a paragraph or two or more, to [email protected]. Ideas for new themes and editorial approaches are also always welcome.

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