Pages & Places, Scranton, and the Learning City

Pages & Places, Scranton, and the Learning City

Beverly Sheppard, President and CEO, The Institute for Learning Innovation (Baltimore, MD)

Pages & Places created a fascinating sense of community last year.  It was richly personal, in the way all readers explore ideas, and highly social, in the way shared learning takes place.  Each panel of speakers became linked to a specific environment ,and the city was the backdrop for the whole.  The day allowed Scranton to become a “learning city,” a series of networked sites that offered an amazingly complex and dynamic set of learning encounters.

Perhaps in this single vibrant day is the beginning of a model that could reenergize the urban experience with a new definition of livability.  What if a city thought of itself as an integrated campus of lifelong learning?  What if it consciously sought to link its cultural and educational resources into a kind of informal learning system that paralleled the formal education system as a resource accessible to all?  Just as Pages & Places spread out across the city and created a “literary campus” for the day, a Learning City would map its cultural assets and create a series of knowledge links that became core to the community.  In our knowledge-based society, such access to learning across a lifetime could become a major civic asset – an indicator of a great city.

Our communities are already filled with such learning resources:  libraries, museums, community centers, public broadcasting, parks, and environmental centers – many, many institutions with public learning at the heart of their mission.  What we have failed to do is recognize and organize the collective power of these resources as a connected learning industry.  While it is common for cities to point with pride at their “cultural institutions,” how many cities point to these same assets as indicators that the city embraces lifelong learning as a core value?

The Learning City would redefine what we call “livability.”  It would respond to the changing issues of our nation or our neighborhood, our longtime residents and our newcomers.  It would build from our current assets.  All it would need to begin is the kind of creativity that is the spark for Pages & Places and, ultimately, a shared commitment to the idea that access to lifelong learning is inherently a civic virtue.