Our intention is to nurture a worldwide conversation on April 13th to encourage people to share their experiences of learning through life and their thoughts and perspectives on one or more of these questions on our new Google+ Forum https://plus.google.com/communities/100364215733010324333
Q1 Why is lifewide learning important to you what does it mean in your everyday life?
Q2 Why is lifewide approach to learning and education important in the modern world?
Q3 How are you involved in encouraging and supporting the lifewide learning of others? It could be your own family or friends, your students or colleagues or the wider world
Q4 What are the particular challenges in encouraging a lifewide approach to learning and achievement in your country?
Our hope is that by having a public conversation we might draw attention to the work we and others are doing to encourage and support people as they learn, develop, create and achieve through all the opportunities that life affords.
To find out more visit our worldwide lifewide learning and education page
April 13th is chosen in commemoration of Eduard Lindeman, a visionary adult educator who died on April 13th 1953. Lindeman believed that education is not bound by classrooms and formal curricula. Rather it involves a concern for the educational possibilities of everyday life; non-vocational ideals; situations not subjects; and people’s experience. He viewed education as life and gave us our strapline. The whole of life is learning, therefore education can have no ending. Lindeman felt our academic system to be in reverse order with subjects and teachers constituting the starting point and students secondary. In conventional education the student is required to adjust to an established curriculum; in adult education the curriculum is built around the students’ needs and interests. He believed:
· Education should be coterminous with life
· It should revolve around non-academic and non-vocational ideas
· It should start with the lives of the learners
· It should look to the learner's own experience as its most valuable resource
To find out more about Eduard Lindeman visit
http://infed.org/mobi/eduard-c-lindeman-and-the-meaning-of-adult-education/
The Meaning of Adult Education https://archive.org/details/meaningofadulted00lind