| In the 1997 general-election campaign,
"Education, Education" was Tony Blair's pet phrase. Time changes quickly.
Education is going rapidly out of fashion. "Learning" (to be exact, "lifelong
learning" ) is New Labour's new buzzword (时髦语). The shift from "education" to
"learning" reflects more than a change of language. It stems from both
educational research and left-wing ideas. During the 1980s, British
educationalists got some new American ideas. One was the notion that traditional
examinations do not test the full range of people's abilities. Another was the
belief that skills are not necessarily learned from teachers in a conventional
classroom. People can pick them up in all sorts of ways. All this echoed left-wing ideas that traditional teaching methods were not sufficiently adaptable to the needs of individual learners. Advocates of lifelong learning argue that it merely describes what has changed in education in the past decade. And there are now hundreds of schemes in which pupils learn outside the classroom. Until now, education has been changing from below. In the next few weeks, the government will help from above. One of its main projects for lifelong learning is about to begin its first pilot programs. With funding of $ 44 million in its first year, it will coordinate a new network of "learning centers" throughout the country. Traditional institutions, such as schools and colleges, will provide training at some non-traditional places of learning, such as supermarkets, pubs, and churches. The theory is that in such places students will feel more at ease, and therefore will be better motivated, than in a classroom. The new schemes allow consumers of education to exercise complete choice over where, what and when they learn. In the rest of the state-run education sectors (部门), the government still seems to be committed to restricting choices as much as possible. If these programs succeed, they could improve the skills of Britain's workforce. |