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LIFE FOR LEARNING OR LEARNING FOR LIFE
Snezana Stavreva-Veselinovska
Introduction
Rapid changes require from every individual to be an innovator or inventor, to run for knowledge till death. Balkan nations, used to ready knowledge and free education, are in danger of finishing this race as street sweepers, i.e. doing the simplest tasks or even being planetary social cases. On the other hand, permanent learning is seen as inhumane for most people. Not everyone can learn how to be flexible, readable, inventive, and run after science till their death. On an island rich with bananas the Americans tried to teach the natives to work, but they failed. They cut down all the banana trees and offered them a job so that they could buy them from other islands. The natives did not learn how to work but they were starving. Therefore, learning for life is not a simple but a complex process in which designers have much more questions than just: is permanent learning necessary?
Life for learning
The Russian socialist school declaratively was atheistic, although it used a medieval-Christian model of education to its maximum. On one hand it included young people in the educational process from their early age, offering them a wide range of educational profiles. It taught them to learn how to learn and to learn how to work. On the other hand, ideological content pervaded through all this knowledge, form the earliest age to late adulthood. The learning of life in a (socialist) community and the learning how to exist in it practically added dedication to the enlightenment (on which the particular theistic education particularly insisted). It built experts, and"a special kind of man''. The bureaucratization of socialism worked on the reorganization of ideological dogmas, but not on neglecting commitment [1]. That neglect came more from the socialist laborers themselves who increasingly noticed the difference between what they learned and what really existed, and even more because of their inability to influence changes in the social environment with their science. At the level of learning for knowledge and learning in order to use knowledge, the socialist school made huge leaps forward. Over 90% of people became literate and rural workers turned into industrial workers, the people from"the fields and forests”were turned into urban population. However, learning
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community life and learning how remained confined to the medieval limiting of life fit for dogmas that were repressively protected.
Western School has gone to another extreme, advocating pure pragmatism. It offered limited specialist knowledge not much interested in the state of the soul. After all, the welfare state, with the strong support of industry, created a consumer society as the counterpart of the ''communist threat'' from the 1950s. The permanence of ''education'' was provided by the industry through the increasingly available merchandise. Industrial society was no less an ideological society, only commitment got an advantage in the production process, and learning for community life and learning how to exist then belonged to the stores that sold goods, to the banks that produced debt bondage and to the policy of loudness. Thanks to the industry, and even more to the low-cost raw materials that were brought from the colonies, a false illusion that industry finally found a model for life was created. When the global economic crisis occurred , it showed that the machines could not meet the people's needs, and that the knowledge from the past became narrowly usable.
Today we live in a world that is neither socialism nor liberalism. The global community is faced with the problem of finding the ideal of future, and therefore the directions of development of education. We live, as Valernstein notes in his book ''After Liberalism", in a chaotic world that will, at least in the next 50-odd years, crystallize in a clear and rounded system. The technology has broken away from state control, and always on one side produces surplus (goods and labor) and on the other great dispersal of raw materials (environmental risk). Series (of cars) are less in number but there are more models. Global market requires constant race for cost-effective invention and innovation; more simply said, for useful and profitable knowledge. It requires the commitment of each member of the planetary community to technological - market game. Otherwise, individuals, regardless of religion or nation, even familial connections, are pushed to the margins with the risk not to be able to provide for even their existential needs. Man is becoming lonelier and, the more schools and programs are offered, the more man is left to himself to influence his fate. Bihevioral scientists in this mainly see the possibility of releasing spiritual potentials and capabilities of the individual, but the reality speaks otherwise. Industrial society was significantly more open to useful knowledge, because profitability was provided by the cooperation of the state and managers. The percentage of employment in the industrial society enabled it to be widely accepted for residents of these states. In today's world the percentage of employment is rapidly declining because
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the power of technology squeezed out many jobs without offering adequate alternatives. Especially older workers are endangered due to redundancies and because they are not prepared to be committed to themselves and their professional development. On the other hand, the young generations spend more and more time studying and thus enter the process of working and earning for their livelihood later and later. Only the luckiest and most talented have the opportunity to spend their whole life learning. They were provided with the free time to get professional training by someone else (parents, companies, countries, etc.). But they do not study independent from the interests of those who allow them to do so, but precisely for their interests. They are separated from their families, social environment, and even from their primary needs. They all marry later and later and there are more divorces. With a lot of questionable ethical values the new world elite is being educated for the new conservative-globalist world order. For that aim, unfortunately, also works the modern intelligentsia in schools and universities. They work by the order of programs that are made up hidden from the public eye.
go relatively There is a risk of losing the meaning of life to those who as well as to those who voluntarily agree run after ,quickly to the periphery Learning encourages the development of one dimension .new knowledge time use of man-One .at the expense of other dimensions of man .ed for continuing his speciestranscends his nature and the ne Wextreme effort modern man increasingly lives for the interests of alienated power centers, less and less asking for the purpose of their inventions, and in general not asking whether they will be in function for or against man [3]. Sooner or later the technological chaos must be stopped, slowed or balanced with the needs of people or cataclysm isthreatening us all [4]. This is known also by those who force it. Their goal is not a global cataclysm, but the global society into a pre- cataclysmic in which theywill appear as saviors, and thus confirm their superiority.
Learning for life
Life is another name for a group of different but intertwined concepts, motions, phenomena, processes, relationships and changes. Individually, none of these is life itself. Life means the dynamic existence of things and beings, conditions and relationships, the nature of the whole earth. On the other hand, we understand things and beings, conditions and relationships solely in the manner of constant values of quantities and qualities that resist motion and changes. Thus there is a contradiction between the forces of movement and the power of resistance, appearance and environment, lawful processes and desirable outcomes, needs and interests, orders for
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changes and orders for conservation both in life and existence of an individual and his/her social groups and communities. People are reluctant to agree to changes, including those that are required by learning and training, when they build a socially acceptable identity about themselves and realize the opportunity of meeting their needs [2].
Evolutionary trends require regular work and gradual changes that are manifested as the development of phenomena, processes, beings and things. It is a harmonious state of existence of quality and quantity. Learning broadethe quantitative of knowledge, but qualitative progress in the development of personalityThe skills and habits of the .are also realized ;e improvedindividual to accept and adopt new knowledge and skills ar she becomes a socially acceptable and useful person aware of/he when the river of life ,But .she would like to be/herself and what he/himself when life enters the ,that is ,enters the narrow canyons and waterfalls changes and processes gain ,vementthen mo ,changed circumstances .speed and unpredictability Cchanges occur that are of global proportions. Here stops the validity of the theory of regular work (and regular learning). The acquired knowledge and skills are called into question, either because they are a technological or (usually) political surplus. Changed social circumstances mock the man's identity, and the person itself own suffering from a series of stress falls into distress and thus writes itself off from active participation (and learning) in further life processes. Behavioral scientists do not have adequate answers to such situations. The natural response is - get away from changes and wait for the life to again become an evolutionary process. At the same time the natural negation is - you cannot get away from change, because aging itself is a process of movement and change. As put by the great Serbian writer Milos Crnjanski, it is a journey from birth towards death.
Learning for life generally involves evolutionary changes, so it could be defined more precisely as learning how to gradually change and adaptat, and learning tolerance towards the movements in the socio-natural environment. It is intentional learning, education and self-education. Intentional learning is nowadays present from preschool education to university studies. It gives good results only if life gradually transforms the socio-natural state. Learning for cyclical changes does not have a foothold in intentional education. It could be imagined only as modeled learning which is preceded by an utopia of cyclical changes. If utopia is not achieved, modeled learning based on heuristic or imaginative approach becomes unusable. Ideological preparations for a revolutionary showdown with the "old forces” are an obvious example of learning for cyclical
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changes. They used to lead to achieving the objective, but for many they were catastrophic and not completely dreamt. The revolutions were eating their children.
Learning for life can be accomplished only when our life can be loomed, showing its appearance form. Only towards such a life do we build positional or oppositional attitudes, set goals and methods of operation. Learning is manifested as a search for content, acquisition of new knowledge, skills and habits. The purpose of this study is enabling or selfenabling of individuals to make sustainable or ordered the numerous contradictions in the movement and changes. In this way, the system consists of sustainable, harmonious and unstressed. Therefore, learning for life is not imposed by life itself, but by the system in the broadest sense of the word. System sometimes means socio-political environment, sometimes corporate plan of production, and sometimes system of needs of individuals, etc. If the meaning is adaptation to objective changes, then the learning is manifested as learning for adaptation (retraining). But if life in any area showed particular interest (personal or corporate), then learning is a process of creating a habit for adaptation and overcoming of an unsustainable situation. Simply, it is not in human nature to constantly conform to others' interests imposed on him as system interests. It is beyond human velleities for improvement and adjustment. All previous historical development took place as the lawful overcoming of unsustainable states, and learning was one of the conditions to overcome them. In education this meant heuristic commitment to life (although generations of people may never understand that they were heuristics), constant attempts and activity, detecting and proving.
Learning for sustainable development
The one ?How available is the ultimate truth of life to learning for life but not the ,available is that which follows from unsustainable situation nable situation isBecause overcoming an unsustai .absolute truth temporary and a relatively sustainable state that has a tendency to express .due to the permanence of movement and change ,in time as unsustainable raises the question of meaning of learning. Without learning there is no adaptation or overcoming of the unsustainable states and states in general . rot ,they corrode ;fs lawsvThings that cannot be adapted show the nature .or otherwise disappear from the process of natural movement and change approach allows us to understand the ups and downs of social systems and formations and to explain these by the ability to adjust (of those systems) to the broader socio-natural environment. The problem occurs when we treat life as something external, a phenomenon from the environment, and we
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think that the problems will be solved by themselves. Our tragedy is nothing but a practical understanding of the aims of movement that are not influenced by us or we have not learned to influence them. is just the reverse of tragedy because it involves human static or reversion in understanding life movements and changes. In life, everyone has problems just because they are not sure where the movement and change are leading, and when they would you like to learn for life (and not for any short-term and visible goal) issues arise about the choice of objectives and methods of continuous monitoring of incessant processes. The future is constantly evaluated by value judgments of today, and it is represented to us as a utopia, we moralize instead of changing ourselves.
Technological society which is only prospectively to be expected is a society of economic- inventive and innovative class that already advocates the idea that there is a surplus of population in the world. This class does not want to share the benefits of life with the ''consumer of life”, i.e. with the economically rejected class. Therefore, they organized solid walls of the army and police cordon towards the periphery of society. The mass protests that followed the G8 heads of state summits or conferences dedicated to climate changes show how great the gap between the opposed classes is, but they also show the weakness of the peripheral class to influence decisions when the nature is the issue. What the peripheral class could not understand was the evolutionary development. It constantly strives to cyclical changes, but cannot find its way in them. Investments in learning, education, personnel - they are the most profitable investments of peripheral states and classes. The world brain trusts can buy part of the scientific potential, and even the best of it, but they must sooner or later lead a dialogue with the peripheral class. Secondly, within the world brain trusts, where scientists from peripheral countries work too, the black and white representation of life and social development fades away. We rarely deal with the fears of the economically powerful class. And they are people too. Their balls are nothing but the fear of death, determination, disappearance. Their exploitation and distrust towards the environment is just another name for fear of poverty or the destruction of other companies. Learning for sustainable development involves learning for possible forms of manifestation of unsustainable states and ways to overcome them. It is damn hard heuristic work that means lifelong learning. On the other hand, it is a damn easy job compared to the unpreparedness for life, ''head hitting the wall'' and possible human disasters.
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Summary
All previous models of learning were learning ''tomorrow for today”'',
i.e. an effort of today to join the future. Learning for sustainable development must be learning "today for the day after tomorrow'', i.e. investing today in tomorrow. Today learning, tomorrow knowledge, the day after self-confidence and openness to phenomena, processes, trends and changes. Enjoyment, that flattering word for doing nothing and lounging -actually there is only a brief respite in the sequence of life developments. Otherwise it is corrosion, decay, disappearance. This is best seen on the periphery of society and in the peripheral countries: addiction, begging, internal conflicts, moral decline and disappearance.
References
1. Карл Корш: "Панекук и раднички савети", у зборнику "Самоуправъаке и раднички покрет", бр. 5, стр. 89, Комунист, Београд, 1973. године).
2. Milenko S. Stojnic, 2002, Dom ucenika-druga skola, Институт за економику и финанси]е, Београд, pp. 75.
3. ^убиша ДеспотовиЬ, 2002, "Еколошка парадигма," Стилос, Нови Сад, pp. 31.
4. Васили] Зе^ковски, 2003, "Проблеми васпитаъа у свестлу хришПанске антрополог^е", pp. 52-53.
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