Lifelong Learning City Suwon Draws Attention from UNESCO and International Organizations

[Suwon Ilbo=Reporter Seo Dong-young] International organizations including the OECD and UNESCO have given high praise to Suwon's achievements in lifelong education.

On the 9th, Suwon City presented a case study at the official launch web seminar of the UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities (GNLC) domestic working council, which was livestreamed on YouTube in the afternoon.

The Global Network of Learning Cities, established by UNESCO's Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL), launched a domestic working council in 2015 to serve as a hub for activating and coordinating national network activities. To commemorate this, UNESCO's Korean Commission, the National Institute for Lifelong Education, and the National Association of Lifelong Learning Cities jointly hosted the web seminar.

In the case study presentation on the theme of "New Deal of Challenge and Harmony: Suwon as a Global Lifelong Learning City," Suwon's case of being the first local government in the nation to integrate a lifelong learning center and a foreign language village was highlighted as a key example.

The presentation described how Suwon overcame the spread of COVID-19 and budget constraints that necessitated scaling back projects, as well as problems arising from outsourced operations, by consolidating the two institutions under the philosophy of lifelong learning to create a newly integrated lifelong learning dedicated agency with distinctive Suwon characteristics.

Suwon City was previously introduced in March as an exemplary case in the OECD Competency Development System Governance report published by the OECD.

This research, aimed at presenting best practices among OECD member countries, was jointly conducted by the OECD Human Capital Strategy Team, the University of Konstanz in Germany, and the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

The research report comprehensively analyzed programs including citizen humanities and general education lectures, urban farming courses, the Tortoise Workshop, learning nests, adult literacy education, Anyone's School, intergenerational empathy programs, and foreign language and cultural experience education. The report also praised Suwon's utilization of a lifelong learning festival for citizens and learning networks with member cities.

In particular, the research report cited the following as strengths of Suwon's lifelong learning system: ▲promoting high learning participation among citizens through more than 600 lifelong education facilities ▲providing programs tailored to specific regional needs ▲fostering a culture of collective decision-making through mutual feedback among Suwon lifelong education-related councils ▲facilitating horizontal communication through the Gyeonggi Province Lifelong Education Promotion Agency.

A city official said, "Suwon's policies for successfully establishing and maintaining a learning city ecosystem through voluntary participation by citizens and institutions have been recognized as best practices by international organizations," and added, "We will continue to implement lifelong learning policies befitting a global learning city."