Thinking differently, together: Towards a lifelong learning society
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Thinking differently, together: Towards a lifelong learning society Paul Stanistreet1 Published online: 4 September 2020 © UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning and Springer Nature B.V. 2020
It has become a cliché to say we are living through unprecedented times. The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a crisis that has not only exposed deep and entrenched inequalities, both within and between societies, but has also demonstrated how profoundly interconnected we all are. How well we recover from or learn to live with COVID-19 will depend, to a large extent, on how willing people are to behave in a cooperative way, acknowledging and respecting the needs of their neighbours as well as their own. This is as true among nations as it is among people. One of the many lessons of the pandemic, highlighted in the final article of this issue of the International Review of Education – Journal of Lifelong Learning (IRE), is how intimately and inescapably individual behaviour and group risk are linked. The worst public health crisis in living memory is an appalling tragedy; but it is also an opportunity – a fleeting one, I suspect – to restore and strengthen our commitment to the common good, address long-standing structural inequalities (and question the privileges of the very wealthy), and radically rethink areas of social policy, including education, in terms of public rather than private good. Old orthodoxies must fall by the wayside if we are to build a future that is fair, safe, inclusive and sustainable. The pandemic has confined people to their homes, deprived some workers of a livelihood (while exposing others and their families to acute risk), shut businesses (in some cases permanently) and forced schools, universities and other education providers to close their doors and seek alternative ways of ensuring continuity of learning. The crisis is presenting enormous challenges in education. New questions are being asked of educators and education policymakers, and they are being asked in every part of the world and at every level of education. Not surprisingly, this crisis has also prompted a major revaluation of what education is for and how fairly its benefits are distributed, and a serious re-examination of whether national systems of education, as they are currently constituted (and funded), can deliver on their increasingly tired-looking promises to alleviate poverty and inequality. With the social contract looking fragile in many parts of the world, and the cost of the * Paul Stanistreet [email protected] 1
UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, Hamburg, Germany
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pandemic being paid disproportionately by those with the least resources, and particularly people in low-paid and precarious employment, it is surely timely to ask what kind of society we want to live in and how education can help get us there. Of course, COVID-19 is not the only, or perhaps even the most significant, challenge we face globally. The climate crisis looms large (July 2019 to June 2020 were
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