The seminal role of “No Limits to Learning” in 1979

“No Limits to Learning”, edited by James W. Botkin, Mahdi Elmandjra, and Mircea Malitza, is the seventh report to the Club of Rome. It was published in 1979 in the original edition by Pergamon Press Ltd, Oxford. The report’s original English title explicitly recalls The Limits to Growth, the title of the first famous report to the Club of Rome (1972). As Aurelio Peccei explains in his preface to the volume, it closes a cycle.

The report is the result of the work, which lasted two years, of three groups set up in Bucharest, Cambridge, and Rabat to represent those who, before the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), were the First, Second, and Third Worlds. Hundreds of people participated in the learning project, mainly voluntarily, and were involved in meetings, discussions, seminars, and conferences in Salzburg, Bucharest, Madrid, Vienna, Fez, Paris, and New York.

The report was previewed in June 1979 at an international conference in Salzburg (Austria), opened by the President of the Republic of Austria, Rudolf Kirchschläger. The report’s final draft incorporated many conference participants’ comments and suggestions. UNESCO Deputy Director-General Federico Mayor attended the conference and expressed his support for the proposal to launch a major research project on learning. He said: “This initiative by The Club of Rome for the further development of the concept of learning, placing learning in the position of the central phenomenon of new societies, is a most timely and fundamental one.”

Key objectives of the Report

In the preface, Aurelio Peccei sums up the report’s meaning: progress is “hectic and haphazard,” but men and women do not fully understand “the meaning and consequences of what they are doing.” In short, there is a “human gap” between the human condition and the natural environment “destined almost inevitably to get much wider”: humans are “increasingly at odds with the real world.” Is it possible to have “the gap bridged before a tragic and grotesque fate overtakes homo sapiens”? The answer lies in:

• Reserves of “resources of vision and creativity” to draw upon.
• “Moral energies to be mobilised.”

Peccei is optimistic: the “learning ability” – innate in every individual – can be stimulated and enhanced—no limits to learning. Solving the human divide and guaranteeing the future: “The human future can be sought nowhere else but within ourselves”. Aurelio Peccei states, ” There really is no other way of turning the global situation around than by improving human quality and preparedness—and this is, therefore, what we must do.” The No Limits to Learning report aimed “to involve as large a segment as possible of public opinion in reflections and debates”.