The University of Bristol will host a major conference [Thursday 19-Saturday 21 June] on the different methods available to teach people new skills outside the traditional classroom environment.
The event will feature leading figures from a variety of walks of life talking about their own learning experiences and how it differs from being at school or college.
The Bristol based singer-songwriter Katey Brooks will be among those taking part along with international horse-riding instructor Mary Wanless, the scientist Heinz Wolff and ITN's newsreader Alastair Stewart, OBE.
Academics from the universities of California and Washington in the United States will also be speaking at the conference - entitled This Learning Life 2.
The three-day event has been organised and sponsored by the Graduate School of Education (GSOE) at Bristol University, the Institute for Advanced Studies and TLO Limited.
Professor Guy Claxton, from the GSOE, said: "The conference is for everyone who wishes education to provide all young people with a more powerful preparation for life in the 21st century.
"Formal education relies on a very narrow view of learning - batches of same-age students sit in specially built classrooms, studying pre-determined, bite-sized curricula under the supervision of the specially trained adults, subjected to periodic grading and selection.
"Yet, elsewhere in the world, and sometimes, just down the road, many quite different ways of doing and construing learning are alive and well.
"We can learn a lot from people who have discovered how to write songs, make money, improvise theatre, design experiments or school horses.
"They draw on very different models of the mind, how it changes and how it can be helped to change, which result in very different kinds of practice.
"If education is a preparation for lifelong learning, can we align the learning models of schools and colleges more closely with those of the real world."
The conference will also feature Bill Lucas - Chairman of the Talent Foundation - Mick Waters - director of Curriculum at the QCA and Kathy Sykes - Professor of Sciences and Society at the University of Bristol.