Lifelong learning: a policy concept with a long past but a short history

This article examines the continuities and discontinuities in the international problematisation of education across the lifespan as an education policy, currently conceptualised as lifelong learning. Through the critical examination of international organisations’ policy documents, this paper demonstrates that while on the one hand there is a pattern in the way the problematisaton has been carried out (the continuities), on the other hand the translation of the problematisaton into policy has been punctuated by major discontinuities. Lifelong learning as a policy concept has introduced strong discontinuities that have ensured its acceptance worldwide: a policy with a small degree of political operationalisation that simultaneous discursively combines different political orientations.     

Lifelong learning and demographics: a Japanese perspective

This paper explores the social dimension of lifelong learning from the perspective of demographics, with particular focus on the issue of the birth of fewer children, which has become one of the most important current social issues in Japanese society. When considering the relationship between lifelong learning and demographics, the issues arising from an ageing population are usually the focus of policy‐makers. This perspective often overlooks crucial children’s issues, such as child development and the influence of the child’s daily environment. This paper suggests that it is necessary to analyse the issues arising from a society with fewer children independent of the concept of an aged society with fewer children in an attempt to emphasize these essential issues. The presented relationship between lifelong learning and the issues surrounding the birth of fewer children is based on two perspectives. The first perspective seeks to remove barriers such as the economic burden of educating children and the traditional stereotypical gender‐roles that have contributed to the birth of fewer children. The second perspective includes a response to the negative influences that the birth of fewer children has had on family’s experiences of child rearing and on children’s growth. Specifically, this paper develops the second perspective by focusing on three aspects: the development of children’s social skills; children’s growth as influenced by a high adult:child ratio; a decline in the quality of child rearing. Three issues are identified as necessary in order to build a Japanese society that fosters children: (1) embracing the concept of the ‘family‐friendly company’; (2)creating opportunities for mixed age groups to participate in learning programmes based on communities and schools; (3) reconsidering an intergenerational exchange programme.     

Lifelong learning: concepts and conceptions

This article reviews a number of versions of the concept of Lifelong Learning and sets out the main lines of the conceptions of education articulated in them. It then goes on to suggest an alternative to attempts to produce essentialist definitions and proffers a pragmatic, problem solving approach. The article draws substantially on the book by the same authors The School, The Community and Lifelong Learning (London: Cassell, 1990).     

Lifelong learning: Implications for institutions

Lifelong learning poses a large number ofthreats and opportunities for the traditionalhigher education institutions. Not justprogramme offerings and means of delivery willhave to be restructured, but, morefundamentally, universities and colleges willhave to rethink and reshape their businessconcept, that is: their way of creating valueand maintaining their competitive edge overother providers in the education system.It will be argued that a business concept thatis based on the idea of creating value throughenhancing differentiation requires highereducation providers to move as much as they canto a student-centered provision of educationand training. This has far-reachingconsequences for the curriculum, the concept ofresearch, the interaction with students, andthe relationships with other institutions inthe education system. It may very well lead toan education system in which there is room forsome universities to transform themselves intodual-sector institutions, that contain both ahigher education part and a vocational part.     

构建终身学习体系建设学习型社会

终身学习是社会中个人根据社会发展和个人发展的需要,利用现代学习技术和手段,灵活地选择安排学习时机、时间、空间以及进程的学习制度,从终身教育走向终身学习,标志着教育乃至社会领域发生了深刻变革,是人类文明的一大进步。由此,构建终身学习体系,形成全民参与的学习型社会,是一个国家兴旺发达的保证。     

Lifelong learning and second-order learning objects

Current cultural, social, and economic trends challenge traditional concepts of learning and lifelong learning. This paper draws on the twofold nature of learning in a knowledge society and explores options for technological support. The concept of Second‐Order Learning Objects is introduced as a potential means to foster generative learning. Generative learning goes beyond that what is already known and extends or transforms the socially shared knowledge including its artefacts and practices. According to the notion of individual and social learning as a process of reflective action, the role of strategies and media for reflection and inquiry is stressed. This paper outlines the use of schematically represented strategies for learning and reflection and sketches important features of a pursuant modelling approach.     

Lifelong learning: Universities and adult education

This paper argues that the driving force of social change in the contemporary world is economic globalisation, which has demanded and more highly educated work force. It discusses six major changes that are occurring in traditional university education, as a result, and notes that universities have now become a site where adults learn. Universities are becoming institutions of lifelong learning. In the final section traditional adult education is reviewed, which is also becoming lifelong learning, and the education of older adults is discussed.     

Lifelong learning: a national trade union strategy in a global economy

The paper considers the role of trade unions in lifelong learning, their strategic approach to lifelong learning, and the opportunities and limitations set by the current stage of globalized capitalist development. The paper has four sections, the first of which considers the relationship between ‘modernization’ as a trade union project and concepts such as reflexive modernity and risk society which have structured much debate in the social sciences in recent years. Secondly, there is a discussion of the exact nature of the role of trade unions in education and training. While it will be suggested that recent developments have greatly increased the scope of trade union involvement in education and training, the third section of the paper will argue that these developments do not represent a coherent strategy on the part of unions, but more a series of responses to the complexity of the contemporary workplace. Based on a theoretical interrogation of data from a number of empirical and policy document sources,¹ the paper will argue that there is a need for conceptual clarity in this field. In the final section, the context of globalization will move to the foreground, in the context of a discussion on the relationship between national trade union policies and global capitalist development.     

我国终身教育、终身学习与学习型社会政策综述

过去的10余年里,我国在有关终身教育、终身学习与学习型社会的教育政策领域内取得了很多突破性进展。该文系统地回顾了10余年里有关终身教育、终身学习与学习型社会的政策的变化历程。     

Lifelong learning and welfare reform

This is the second of two papers which explore the scope and limitations of lifelong learning as an object of policy. In the first (see Griffin 1999) the evolution of the social democratic perspective was described. According to this perspective, it was suggested, the attempt to render lifelong learning as an object of policy entailed a reductionist concept of learning, so that it stood for little more than the expansion of education and training provision. In the following paper, an alternative perspective on lifelong learning, also emerging from the policy literature, removes it from the possibility of traditional policy analysis, relocating it in culture, civil society and patterns of lifestyle, leisure and consumption. Analytic distinctions between education and learning, function and provision, policy and strategy, and markets and quasi-markets are employed to explore various policy models. It is suggested that this perspective on lifelong learning needs to be understood in relation to policies for welfare reform and the crisis of the welfare state. In effect, it amounts to the integration of education policy into wider policies for welfare reform.     

From Training to Education. Lifelong learning in China

Lifelong learning was nothing unusual in the Chinese tradition. There was no age limit for education in ancient China, although education in those days was mainly for examinations, which were the testing ground for officials. A system of adult education was established in the 1950s, but that was to complement the formal education system as an instrument to implement state manpower planning. Lifelong education as a modern notion was introduced to China only at the end of the 1970s immediately after the Cultural Revolution. The notion did not gain much ground when education was closely associated with state manpower plans, and individuals did not have much room for personal development. The break away from strict manpower planning in the early 1980s has given rise to individual aspirations for education. Such aspirations have integrated with the long tradition of self-motivation in learning and have given rise to spectacular expansion in all kinds of adult education. While the motives for such learning are still very much related to jobs and incomes, alternative objectives for learning are fast developing outside the formal sectors of education. This article analyses the recent development of lifelong education in China, and uses Shanghai, the most developed city, as an illustration.