LLinE Lifelong Learning in Europe

Editorial Arne Carlsen: The Basic Skills are now more than before

This issue of the Journal of Lifelong Learning in Europe LLinE is a special issue on New Basic Skills. It focuses mainly on the need in the knowledge-based economy and society for developing new basic skills. Educational systems in Europe have since Hellenic times been based on developing the classical basic skills – first in the form of the Septem Artes Liberales composed of Trivium and Quadrivium, later on in the form of literacy composed of reading, writing and mathematics.

With the rise of knowledge-based economies and societies, knowledge becomes the pivotal element, especially in its relation to action and practice. In the past decade we have experienced a growing emphasis on the triple elements of knowledge, skills and competences, and just as the main emphasis in the beginning was on knowledge, knowledge production and knowledge management, the emphasis later on shifted to skills and the need for more and new basic skills. Today we need new basic skills to be taught and acquired in school together with the classical ones, and to be integrated as well in basic education for adults – as a precondition for access to lifelong learning. Lifelong learning and continuing education and training build on basic and new basic skills.

The past five years finally have witnessed the need for emphasis on competence development, integrating knowledge, skills and attitudes with the capacity to do, act and manage life and work. The more rapid, profound and multi-faceted societal and economic change than we anticipated must affect critically also educational systems.

As a result of this development, educational policies all over the world are shifting from mere educational policies to include labour market policies and transforming into learning policies or competence policies. Literacy in the future will not only consist of the ability to read, but also of what you can do with this ability. A new focus has emerged on how educational and learning systems can develop communicative competences by focussing on learning outcomes and on new balances between curriculum and didactics. The new integrated approach to Lifelong Learning, including formal, non-formal and informal learning, recognition of prior learning and a new understanding for workplace learning has not only put the learner at the centre, with the ensuing consequences for teaching and guidance-counselling, but also puts huge challenges for institutions and organisations, and for decision-makers at the political level.

Several international organisations have been developing conceptual frameworks for coping with these challenges, from the EU framework for key competences in lifelong learning to the EU Qualifications Framework for Lifelong Learning, and from the OECD’s Definition and Selection of Key Competences to the Overarching Conceptual Framework for Key Competences of the ASEM University Hub for Lifelong Learning Studies. We need more consensus on how to deal with these matters, fortunately there is a growing common understanding of the need to find solutions. As an example, Asian and EU countries have much to learn from each other, also when it comes to good practice and knowledge- and research-based educational practices and policies. A new partnership has to be forged among practitioners, researchers and policy-makers in order to foster evidence-based educational practises that can develop new basic skills and key competences, and evidence-based educational policies, that can organise and support this development.

This issue deals with new skills development through lifelong learning. From basic skills to key competences. Through lifelong learning.

Chairman of the ASEM University Hub for Lifelong Learning Studies
Vice-Rector for International Affairs, Danish University of Education
and Member of the LLinE International Editorial Board.