ABSTRACT
We turn now to the tools that assist individual citizens to develop their own potential and ultimately enhance the prospects for cities and regions to create a culture of learning. But before addressing the available tools and techniques, it is important to know just how important individual development is in the growth of a learning city and region, and why and how underachievers, the disaffected and the disadvantaged, can and should be as much a part of the learning society as everyone else. As we have seen in other chapters, the movement towards implementing concepts of lifelong learning in cities and regions is primarily a response to the complexities of change, culture and civilisation in the modern world, and should be acknowledged in those terms. But, however much the conditions for supportive learning are made available, in the end it is the individual citizens who exercise the choice to learn or not to learn. The American journalist and futurologist, Alvin Toffler, is aware of this. In The Third Wave (1980) he, not surprisingly, sees education as the answer: ‘The responsibility for change lies with us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical’.
