In today's society, lifelong learning was not an option, it was a necessity, a European Commission official told an international conference in Limerick yesterday.
Dr Marc Durando said that the pace and direction of changes in society made concepts such as "permanent retraining, continuing training, updating and refining knowledge and developing parallel skills" especially important.
The effect of changes in production systems, work organisation and consumption patterns brought about by the information society would be comparable with those of the first industrial revolution, he said.
Dr Durando was addressing 300 delegates from 30 European countries, the US and Australia at the 23rd annual conference of the Association for Teacher Education in Europe, which is being held this year at the Mary Immaculate College in Limerick.
He told delegates that communication and the sharing of information and technology were the keys to the future as the 21st century beckoned.
Moving from the concept of teaching to that of learning raised certain questions which the universities could not afford to ignore, he said.
"While the basic tasks of universities admittedly mention the idea of continuing training with education and research, there is nonetheless a stark discrepancy between the lip-service paid to the concept and the reality of the situation on the ground.
"The educational institutions' overall position in this learning society will very largely depend on their ability to find permanent interactions between initial training and continuing training. Without abandoning the transmission of basic technical and professional knowledge, universities must also be capable of providing elements of an answer to what could be called `knowledge of social skills'."
Dr Durando said that these social skills covered "relational capacities, people's behaviour in the workplace, the ability to co-operate and work in a team, creativity, initiative cultural sensitivity, an awareness of international aspects and the ability to negotiate and take decisions".
While such skills could really only be fully mastered in a work environment - for example, on an in-service basis - it was still true that universities could do a great deal to prepare their students for such skills without relinquishing their primary missions.