The message in the heading of the Times of Malta editorial of December 4, 2024 – that lifelong learning is “key” – is important. In Malta, our policymakers have known about it for decades. Elsewhere, it has been about since the 1960s at least, officially adopted and promoted by UNESCO, the OECD and the Council of Europe.
Its message is simple and pragmatic: in this rapidly changing world of ours driven by rapid technological advance, no one, literally, can ever afford to stop learning.
For decades, since the 1980s, our policymakers trivialised its meaning by representing it as a trendier name for part-time adult courses. In 2000, Malta, then an EU candidate country, responded to the European Commission’s memorandum on lifelong learning, itemising several “key messages” relating to it, with a status report. It subsequently responded to the encouragement to devise a national strategic plan to implement the messages, in line with the then commission’s ambition to create a ‘European lifelong learning area’.
The story of that ill-fated initiative project is told in a book I published recently.
The first officially published Malta National Lifelong Learning Strategy 2020, a belated response to ‘Malta’s obligations within the EU Lisbon process’, acknowledged that lifelong learning “comprises all learning from ‘the cradle to the grave’”, but opted to focus on adult work-related learning exclusively for two main, flawed, reasons: (1) that “within the EU, lifelong earning is often used interchangeably with adult learning”, is measured by the “participation of people aged 25-64 years old”, and is funded accordingly; and (2) that compulsory schooling is well-catered for already, while “adult learning remains the weakest link in the national lifelong-learning system”.
The first claim, about EU practice, is true, but it only justifies the decision to adopt it if one accepts that the funding is a sufficient reason for doing so. The practice is the result of successive EU commissions backsliding on the political and social commitments of earlier commissions after Delors, to “include active citizenship, personal fulfilment and social inclusion, as well as employment-related aspects” in their narrative of lifelong learning, in favour of a near-exclusive economic narrative about satisfying the HR needs of competitive national economies.
Subscribing to it, and dispensing with the earlier commission’s social and political concerns, effectively means disenfranchising all not in the 25-64 age bracket and the working of their right to support for their learning beyond their schooling in a world where continuing learning is not a luxury or pastime but a fundamental need for all, including, as Times of Malta rightly points out, those of post-retirement age, because “keeping the brain active may help prevent diseases such as dementia”. The strategic document’s claim that adult learning is the weaker link in the chain of lifelong-learning provision is also true. But it doesn’t justify the assumption that our schooling system is already well-served. It isn’t for sure, if adult learning is strategically dissociated from schooling, as it suggests, in violation of the universally recognised truth that schooling is a preparation for adulthood. An adulthood which, in our contemporary world, requires one to be a lifelong learner, as our National Curricula of 1999 and 2012 both well recognise.
The latter to the extent of roundly declaring that “the ultimate goal of the National Curriculum Framework is to enable individuals to become lifelong learners”. Which means giving them “the knowledge, skills, competences, attitudes and values necessary to be attracted to further and higher education, to re-skilling and up-skilling during the working years, and to active participation in the civic and social life of our country”.
We got three ministers producing four distinct national strategic plans… devised by four different teams- Kenneth Wain
The NCF follows this declaration up with another identifying “learners who are capable of successfully developing their full potential as lifelong learners” as the first Learning Outcome for secondary schools. Which means making “learning to learn … a priority in Malta’s education context as it provides the ability to pursue and persist in learning” required for “lifelong learning within a knowledge society and economy”.
It is incomprehensible how, instead of coordinating their policy with the NCF (which is prescribed by the 1988 Education Act), the unnamed policymakers who drafted the National Lifelong Learning Strategy 2020, absurdly dissociated compulsory schooling from lifelong learning. Especially when it is clear that none of the qualities identified with the lifelong learner by the NCF are natural. Nor are they easily recuperated in adult life if they are not obtained in childhood.
Skilling schemes alone won’t do the trick, unless they include the research skills intrinsic to learning to learn and initiation into the attitudes, values and outlook that define the lifelong learner, and that are best cultivated early in life.
Sadly, both errors were inherited and entrenched in two other strategic lifelong learning policy documents that incomprehensibly followed on the 2020 document. A National Strategy for Lifelong Learning 2020-2030, which didn’t even recognise the 2020 document in its bibliography. And, the National Lifelong Learning Strategy 2023-2030, followed by a National Education Strategy 2024-2030. Where sane policy-making following the 2020 document was to evaluate the implementation status of the 40 programmes it identified, assess their future, build on what is achieved, close the non-functional, and possibly open new ones for the coming decade.
Instead, we got three ministers producing four distinct national strategic plans within a brief four-year bracket, devised by four different teams, three about ‘lifelong learning’. And none, it seems, drafted with any input by the researchers in the faculty of education at the University of Malta, whose expertise covers the whole span of learning from early childhood to adulthood. The claim to have “consulted” with them doesn’t wash. It is madness to do policy without involving the relevant experts in the area in the drafting.
This was not how things were done between 1995, with the production of Tomorrow’s Schools, and 2012. Nearly ipso facto, the faculty dean or his/her delegate was on every important policy initiative in education during that time.
Claims like that in the Lifelong Learning Strategy 2023-2030 – that “it is vital to dissociate the concepts of learning and education from compulsory schooling” – are simply nonsensical and raise concerns over what the drafters suppose the business of schools to be about if not learning and educating. And whether they are even familiar with the NCF, the engine that should be driving our schools.
Ensuring that schools are taking their “ultimate goal” to “enable individuals to become lifelong learners” seriously, through serious external monitoring, is the education ministry’s responsibility, and what it would have been better employed doing over these years.
Kenneth Wain is the author of the recently published book Lifelong Learning in Malta: Towards the Learning Society.