No limits to learning : bridging the human gap

No Limits to Learning is a Club of Rome report by authors from socialist and Third World Countries, as well as from the West. It reconsiders global problems such as energy, communications, cultural identity, and the arms race, focusing primarily on the human element rather than predominantly on the material constraints to growth. This is because learning and the individual human being not material resources are the key to the world's future. Of particular importance is the concept of cietal learning. How can a society learn to cope with an energy crisis? Can it 'read the energy environment, understand how options will be foreclosed or kept open, build the necessary institutions, and create the norms and laws indispensable to a situation of increasing demand and dwindling supplies? The risks inherent in the widespread reliance on learning by shock" are exposed. The authors propose as an alternative the development of 'anticipatory and altern participatory learning. The fundamental question raised is whether humanity can shift from a mode of learning characterized by unconscious adaptation to one of conscious anticipation.