New learning: a charter for change in education 1

In this moment of tremendous change, investing in old ways of doing education is not the best way forward. In offering a Charter for Change we recognise that knowledge and learning will be pivotal to the social and personal transformations necessary to address the idiosyncratic challenges of our times. The transformed economic system emerging from the current financial crisis will require human capacities that only education can nurture, based on deep knowledge, practical imagination, creative participation, intellectual inquisitiveness and collaborative commitment – not just on the part of a knowledge elite, but of the many in the labour force and in the broader society. Extending opportunity to those marginalized by poverty and discrimination over the longer run depends almost entirely on the education system, including the reduction of high school drop-out rates, increasing access to college and introducing lifelong learning programs in community colleges for adults who have been displaced by economic globalization. Emerging digital information technologies demand greater participation than the knowledge systems of our recent past, blurring as they do the boundaries between authors and audiences, creators and consumers, knowledge makers and knowledge users. Immigration, globalism and diversity require that we nurture civic impulses based on new paradigms of self-governance for groups and, amongst individuals, mutual responsibility, despite vast variations in life experience and sensibility. Our learning systems have to be transformed to acknowledge these new demands and related changes in epistemologies and ways of being. These are the challenges addressed in this paper.