THE STORY OF THE POSTING BELOW, TITLED, “LIFE CENTRED SCHOOLS… OR WHAT OUR SCHOOLS WOULD BE LIKE IF WE REALLY BELIEVED IN LIFELONG EDUCATION”

Some of these remarks appear elsewhere on this blog, but they are most apropos to this article, written in 1992.

In 1970, Alberta was spending more per capita on its schools than any province in Canada. Yet, we had the lowest rate of community based learning in Canada. This statistic on learning rates describes the average number of adults a year in a given area who engage in any kind of planned learning experience as a part of their ongoing lifestyles. It excludes learning involvement by adults in fulltime programmes. The Alberta rate at that time was ten percent, tied with Newfoundland as the lowest in Canada. This means that, on average, one adult in ten was engaged in a planned, community based, learning experience, whatever the nature of that experience, in Alberta in 1970.

At the time, having already made thirty four trips around the sun, (well, at thirty four years of age), and having worked as an army officer, teacher and superintendent of schools, I was asked to take on the job of Alberta’s first coordinator for continuing education. As I look back at my working experience, which concluded in 1993 with provincial cutbacks to many social programmes, I am most appreciative of the work opportunities I had. My job in 1970 was to up that learning rate by adults in Alberta. Statistics were hard to come by in the discipline, however, it was determined that Sweden had the highest rate in the world of community based learning by adults in that year (1970). Their rate was twenty-five percent. That became the Alberta target.

Over the twenty three years following 1970, two educational programmes were developed and implemented to try to get Alberta up to the twenty-five percent rate of community based learning by adults. These were the Alberta Further Education Policy, implemented in 1975, and the Alberta Community School Programme, which came into effect in 1980.

In 1984, Statistics Canada did the first comprehensive, statistical study of adult education across Canada. The learning participation rate for Canada was nineteen percent. Alberta had a rate of twenty-five percent, the highest in the country. The Canadian Association for Adult Education declared Alberta as “Canada’s Learning Province.”

In 1992, the Paris based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), made up of the twenty-eight richest countries in the world, did a statistical study to determine the best “Learning Cities” on the planet. They identified seven such cities. The list included Gothenburg, Vienna, Bologna, Pittsburgh, Kakagawa, Adelaide and Edmonton.

In the early summer of 1992, the OECD sent a researcher, a thirty something British man named John Hirsch, as I recall, to visit each of these cities to find out why they had achieved the statistical status in community based adult learning to get the designations as Learning Cities.

When he came to Edmonton, I was asked to arranged that he be taken to talk to people involved in Designated Community Schools (hosted at Norwood Community School in the inner city.) Mr. Hirsch also met with people involved with the Edmonton Association for Continuing Education an Recreation (EACER), Edmonton’s Local Further Education Council.

That fall, I received a request from Mr. Hirsch to write a paper for the OECD on our Alberta Community School Programme. The paper was to focus on the idea of the nature of schools should lifelong learning really be taken seriously. Mr. Hirsch asked that I not use the term “community school” in the title of the paper because it had so many differing definitions world wide. Thus came the title, “Life Centred Schools… Or What Our Schools Would Be Like If We Really Believed in Lifelong Learning.” The paper was to be used in an OECD conference on learning cities to be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, in the summer of 1993.

In late January of 1993, I travelled to Paris to deliver the “Life Centred Schools…” paper. As I was already going to Europe, I had also been invited to visit Sweden where interest was growing about the Alberta Community School Programme. They were interested in the fact that Designated Community Schools had increased the adult education learning rate by ten fold in the attendance areas of the community schools despite the existence of a Local Further Education Council in the region. It was there I learned the Swedish community based learning rate had reached fifty percent, while we had reached twenty-five. This did not surprise me because there had been many hurdles put in the way of the development of both the Alberta Further Education Policy and the Alberta Community School Programme.

On my return to Edmonton in early February of 1993, I was met at the airport by my wife, Marjorie. Sadly, she informed me that Alberta Community School Programme had been eliminated by the Province of Alberta as a cost cutting measure. It was an irony considering the international recognition the Programme had received. The opportunity to take early retirement was offered to public servants affected by cut backs and I availed myself of it, effective 1 April, 1993.

The cost cutting measures also greatly diminished the effectiveness of the Further Education Councils. Alberta is now below the national average in community based learning by adults.

The Gothenburg conference on Learning Cities took place a few months later.
A colleague, John Fisher, who was in the position I had occupied when I began my adult education work in the 1970’s, told me about the closing ceremonies at the Gothenburg conference. He asked Mr. Hirsch a question, “What was the most exciting thing you found in your visits to the seven learning cities.” His response was, “That is easy, it was Edmonton, Alberta, and my visit to Norwood Community School where I was introduced to the Alberta Community School Programme. I also learned Alberta’s system of Local Further Education Councils.”

The posting below has some idiosyncrasies. As an advocate of lifelong learning, these give me an opportunity to learn how to avoid such glitches in future! The article starts with five or six pages which are the conclusion of and an appendix to the main article. So, drop down to the seventh posting and click on it to enlarge. Also, you will need to go to the bottom of the visible postings to click on “2007”in the Blog Archive to reveal the full article.