Lifelong Learning

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, for securing this debate. I am interested in his suggestion of a subscription model for universities for lifelong learning, not just because, as someone who spent about 8.3 years full-time equivalent in universities, I would do rather well out of that model; none the less, I am going to stick with the Green Party’s understanding that education is a public good that should be paid for from general taxation—far more progressive taxation than we have now—rather than being a weight on the individual.

I commend the noble Lord particularly for the phrasing of the question, which looks at the social and personal value of lifelong learning, as well as the economic value. To be an informed voter, to be a parent able to help their children navigate a fast-changing world in the age of shocks, to contribute to your community as a citizen, lifelong learning is not a “nice to have”, or an add-on but an essential basis for health and survival, both individually and collectively.

However, I am going to turn one word around and focus on the importance of unlearning what we might previously have been taught—of acknowledging that science and knowledge are not one fixed certainty, or a tower built on solid foundations, progressing forward with stately certainty. As a society, as individuals, we need to unlearn much.

I am 58 years old, and much of what I was taught at school and early university, from the supposition of DNA providing a blueprint for life to the “primitiveness” of hunter-gatherer life and the inevitability of the tragedy of the commons, was demonstrably wrong. Much of the thinking of the 20th century—which often in the global North claimed universality but in fact was highly particular to the ideology and interests of the few at that moment—has been disproved or simply surpassed by the huge volume of knowledge generation we have seen in recent decades and, just starting, by knowledge recovery from indigenous and other cultures.

To give three examples: students are still taught, and the media extols in expensively produced wildlife documentaries and casual news commentaries, that life on this planet is built on the foundation of competition. Yet everyone should know that the 20th-century giant of biology, Lynn Margulis, developed our understanding of symbiosis—the co-operation between species—and of the source of mitochondria and chloroplasts, the origin and foundation of all complex life forms, and everyone should understand how soils are a co-operative production of more-than-human life and non-living entities, not an inert chemical substrate, as I was taught at university. If the very foundation of life is co-operation, not competition, our view of the world and our society has to change.

Then there is the so-called central dogma of US biologist James Watson, the physicist, eugenicist and misogynist—after whom, astonishingly, the new research centre at St Pancras was named—which has been substantively debunked yet is still widely taught.

There is also the tragedy of the commons, which is all too often taught as fact rather than the fantasy of Garrett Hardin, a would-be applier of coercive population control. We were told that holding resources in private ownership was the only way to protect them. Yet it was in 1990 that Elinor Ostrom, later a Nobel Economics Prize winner, published Governing the Commons: the Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.

The Minister frequently speaks to us about the Government’s curriculum review. I hope that it and indeed the curriculums and approaches of our colleges and universities, and the approaches to further education taken by everything from the University of the Third Age to sceptics in the pub, will all adopt knowledge for the 21st century, because that is what we need.