This chapter reviews the literature to provide a background on the historical development, definitions, and principles why the concept of a learning society continues to be relevant, more so in an age of disruption. It illustrates what is meant by “age of disruption”, which includes the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0, globalization, climate change, technological disruption, artificial intelligence, and geopolitical peace and conflict situations. In particular, this chapter presents learning societies against a recent, urgent, concentrated example of a truly global disruption: the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. While COVID-19 is global in scale and interconnected in complexity, its impact is still very local—hence the importance of place and context. This opens up the relevance and urgency of the learning society concept to be applied in practice. The current practice of utilizing a learning city approach to learning societies is growing. But to truly implement this concept, what is needed is an application of the theory of lifelong learning and learning societies that considers place and context. Implementation of appropriate policies; more responsive governance structures; multi-stakeholder partnerships; civil society engagement; and measurement and evaluation, are all key elements for a learning society in an age of disruption.
History
Publication title
Powering a Learning Society During an Age of Disruption
Volume
58
Editors
S Ra, S Jagannathan and R Maclean
Pagination
15-32
ISBN
978-981-16-0982-4
Department/School
Office of the Faculty of Education
Publisher
Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
Publication status
Published
Place of publication
Singapore
Extent
21
Rights statement
Copyright 2021 The Author(s) This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 IGO license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/igo/) which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the Asian Development Bank, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made
Socio-economic Objectives
169999 Other education and training not elsewhere classified, 160104 Professional development and adult education