The Idea of a Learning Society

A learning society cannot be built. It grows. It evolves. The conditions that foster the evolutionary process are, like for any other such process, multiple and diverse. In a learning society learning occurs everywhere. It pervades all aspects of life. It is not restricted to individuals but also extends to groups of people. Groups of people can learn, not just in the sense that the different individuals who are part of the group learn, but in the sense that the group as a whole behaves in a way that shows that it, as a group, learns. Further on in this article I shall use the term ‘learning entity ’ to designate anything that learns, whether an individual or a socially organized group of people. So, some learning entities are individual people, others are small groups of people, such as families, yet others may be very large and complex, such as a city or a network of people – which may span the entire globe – involved in trying to tackle a particular problem or respond to a specific opportunity. Larger learning entities may, in fact, be made up of smaller ones, and those smaller ones may be made up of yet smaller ones, down to the level of individual people. All those learning entities are in different ways interconnected. The boundaries between them are not rigid. Many things get exchanged between them, including what they know and their capabilities to respond to the things that constantly change around them. Learning thus manifests itself at different levels of social organization, ranging from the individual to society at large. It is by nature something of which the overall behavior is, in a complex way, dependent on the interactions of the different entities that constitute the whole. In my view it is important t