Risk management by a neoliberal state: construction of new knowledge through lifelong learning in Japan

This article examines the current developments in Japan's lifelong learning policy and practices. I argue that promoting lifelong learning is an action that manages the risks of governance for the neoliberal state. Implementing a new lifelong learning policy involves the employment of a political technique toward integrating the currently divided and polarized Japanese population – popularly called kakusa – into the newly imagined collective, namely, atarashii kōkyō or the New Public Commons. Examining the macro policy discourse on Japan's educational policy, this article demonstrates Japan's inflections of neoliberal governmentality with the new distribution of responsibility between the state and the individuals through the construction of new knowledge supporting the New Public Commons. In fact, new knowledge is the epicenter of the national educational policy discourse aiming at generating social solidarity in local communities.     

The policy reassembly of Afghanistan's higher education system

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how a national higher education sector can be assembled upon a relatively narrow ideological foundation during and in the aftermath of violent conflict. It analyses the case of Afghanistan's higher education system, and argues that the violent disintegration of this system during the 1980s and 1990s created the conditions for a neoliberal reassembly and subsequent expansion of higher education from 2001. This paper draws on data gathered from document analysis, and semi-structured interviews with key policy actors. It identifies an ideological grounding in neoliberalism within higher education policies which are responsible for directing the sector's growth since 2010. I argue that this neoliberal agenda, largely driven by globalised influences, has exploited Afghanistan's conflict-affected context to position higher education primarily as a driver of economic growth, thus limiting policy emphasis on higher education's non-economic dividends. The paper concludes by critiquing the underlying assumption that this role is sufficient if higher education is to serve as a key institution in Afghanistan's ongoing national development.     

Manifestations of neoliberal discourses within a local job‐training program

The purpose of conducting this study was to understand how neoliberal discourses manifest within the local context of a short‐term, job‐training program offered at a two‐year college in the USA. Ethnographic data were collected at the local site through interviews, observations and document analysis. We then situated these data within a global context represented by a corpus of purposively selected national and international policy texts. Focusing on three components of discourse as social action—genres, representations and identities—the data analysis illuminated three interrelated themes relating to how institutional actors translated neoliberal discourses available at the global scale into practice. The ideological consequences for learners as well as examples of counter‐hegemonic resistance are discussed.     

Neoliberalism,lifelong learning,and the homeplace: problematizing the boundaries of ‘public’ and ‘private’ to explore women's learning experiences

This paper develops a critical feminist theoretical analysis of the significance of the homeplace in explaining the experiences of adult women learners. It argues that current discourses in lifelong learning are shaped by neoliberal influences that emphasize individualism, competition, and connections to the marketplace. Critical educators, drawing upon a Habermasian analysis, make some valid critiques of problems with developing an educational agenda shaped by neoliberal values, but their assessment is insufficient for explaining the persistence of gender inequalities within adult education. This is because critical theory does not adequately take up other ‘medias’ of power, such as patriarchy. A feminist lens is used to explore and complicate the perceptual divisions between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres through an examination of three focal points in the homeplace; identity, relationships, and labour. Drawing upon a social science and humanities (SSHRC) research study that looks at women's learning trajectories in Canada, and a Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) grant on women and active citizenship, examples are brought in to support the discussion. From this analysis, recommendations are made for educators, administrators, and policy makers to challenge a neoliberal agenda in lifelong learning and develop a more holistic and gender inclusive approach that troubles commonly accepted parameters of ‘public’ and ‘private’ by exploring the significance of the homeplace on adult learning experiences.     

Globalisation and Its Educational Discontents: Neoliberalisation and its impacts on education workers' rights,pay and conditions

This article examines some impacts of neoliberal education policies during the current period of the intensification of neoliberal capital. Section 1 examines the relationship between education and capital, identifying three plans capital has in relation to education. It sets out some of the major aspects of neoliberal policy developments in schooling and further education. Section 2 describes, analyses and evaluates the research methodology used in developing this article, locating the methodology within the debate between 'methodological purists' on the one hand, and 'committed research' on the other. The research for this article, within the 'research for social justice' paradigm, is rationalised. Section 3 examines the impacts of neoliberalisation on education workers' securities - their pay/ salaries, conditions of employment, stresses and pressures at work, and their work identity and status. It also examines the impacts on the rights and powers of education trade unions. The article ends, in Section 4, by briefly calling for resistance to the global neoliberal capitalist agenda in schooling and education.     

A future for adult lifelong education in Aotearoa New Zealand: neoliberal or cosmopolitan?

This paper sets out to answer two questions ‘Given the policy settings for lifelong learning for adults in Europe and much of the western world, what are the policy settings and experiences in Aotearoa New Zealand?’ and ‘Will the future of adult lifelong education there be neoliberal or cosmopolitan?’ The article first examines some of the roots of post‐compulsory education policy in Aotearoa New Zealand over the last 30 years. In particular it considers trends in philosophies and practices about educating adults as well as some of the varied policy discourses prevailing over this period. Next it reviews the ever‐changing policy landscape, in particular unresolved tensions between social and economic goals, the acquisition of skills for learning for living and dialogic social purpose learning, and attainment of social cohesion and recognition of diversity. Finally the paper attempts to preview how these tensions may play out in an uncertain future.     

The production of Australian professional development policy texts as a site of contest: The case of the federal quality teacher programme

This paper reveals how the provision of teacher professional development is conceptualised within the Australian Government Quality Teacher Programme (AGQTP) policy text and its predecessors, and uses these texts to infer the nature of the production practices associated with the development of these policies. The paper argues that multiple tensions within these texts gesture towards support for complex and contested approaches to professional development during the policy production process. To make sense of this contestation, the paper draws suggestively upon Bourdieu’s field theory, which conceptualises the social world as consisting of social spaces or “fields”, and extensions of his theory, which reveal fields as exerting considerable influence upon one another. The paper argues that “Quality Teacher Programme” texts infer support for more progressive, social democratic approaches to the provision of teacher professional development within the educational policy field, as well as more economistic and neoliberal approaches.     

Growing up in the Federal Republic of Germany: chance and risk in a modern Sozialstaat 1

This paper seeks to extend work previously published that points to the importance of rhetorical analysis to policy studies. It argues against the notion that policy can be dismissed as ‘spin’ and explores further the work of rhetoric within the UK government’s policy texts of lifelong learning. For the authors, rhetorical analysis helps to point to the politics of discourse that is at play in policy‐making processes. This paper points to some of the conceptual resources upon which one can draw in undertaking rhetorical deconstructions of policy texts and discourses, in this case, of lifelong learning, and one’s own role, as analysts and sultans of spin.     

Envisioning a critical social pedagogy of learning and work in a contemporary culture of cyclical lifelong learning

In Canada, current federal learning-and-work policy is focused on individual learner-worker development using an iteration of lifelong learning as cyclical. This policy aims to enhance the social as an effect of enhancing the economic. In this neoliberal milieu, cyclical lifelong learning has become not only a norm but also a culture and an attitude. Still, a current Canadian phenomenon indicates that increasing numbers of young adults are disengaging from participation in such learning that the federal government considers being a preventive measure. In discussing their withdrawal from what might be perceived as cyclical lifelong learning for control, I consider a particularly challenging case: the predicament of young adults in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. To help us think about adequately addressing the dislocation they experience in life and work, I offer a Freire-informed vision of a critical social pedagogy of learning and work. This pedagogy calls for re-engendering the social in lifelong learning by revitalizing critical social concerns with historical awareness, hope, possibility, ethics, justice, democratic vision, learner freedom, critique, and intervention.     

Japan’s new lifelong learning policy: exploring lessons from the European knowledge economy

The concept of ‘lifelong learning’ or shōgai gakushū has rapidly become one of the topmost priorities in Japan’s education policy agenda. This was considerably evident in December 2006 when the term ‘lifelong learning’ was added to Japan’s educational charter, the Fundamental Law of Education. This paper explores, as a means to develop Japan’s new lifelong learning policy, the lessons that can be learnt through an examination of the European countries’ efforts to build a knowledge economy, where lifelong learning is regarded as the key solution in overcoming several important social and economic concerns. In this paper, I first examine the current situation of lifelong learning in Japan, employing the ethnographic data that I have collected since 2001. Second, I provide a brief review of the European lifelong learning policy, which is one of the priority guidelines in the European Union. Under the Lisbon Strategy, for example, the argument on European lifelong learning theoretically centres on developing human capital in order to survive in the global knowledge economy. Lastly, referring to the European experience over the past decade, I propose to directly connect Japan’s latest policy development regarding lifelong learning with the trend of building human capital through lifelong learning in order to enhance its competitiveness in the era of globalisation.     

Further Education under New Labour: translating the language of aspiration into a springboard for achievement

In this article, Ann Limb outlines the main elements of new Labour's emerging policy framework for adult, continuing and further education within the context of the debate about lifelong learning. The government has established its coherent purposes for further education and now expects successful implementation by the sector in return for significant funding. Raising standards and widening participation are the keystones of this policy and, as in other areas of government activity, ‘zero tolerance of failure’ and ‘social inclusion’ are at the heart of the agenda for further education. The article suggests that the diverse assumptions underlying the delivery of lifelong learning policies nonetheless remain largely unexplored and that it is too soon to make a sound judgment about the likely effectiveness of the new lifelong learning partnerships     

Home,work, families and children: New labour,new directions and new dilemmas

This article considers the relationships between children, parents and the state in the context of changing global, social and family structures and policy developments, providing a case study of New Labour policies in Britain. It first considers the changing ideological discourses about families, parents, especially lone mothers, children, 'home' and 'work'. Secondly, it reviews the evidence about the changing socio-economic context and for what has been termed the fragmenting family. Thirdly, it provides an analysis of the New Labour government's approach to education, welfare and family policies, including the national child care strategy and supporting families consultation document. It sets this analysis in the context of changing political discourses and from a feminist perspective, arguing that the policies are not 'joined up' but fragmented and diverse, deriving from a variety of sources and targeted on a number of different groups. Thus it is difficult to argue that there is but one modernisation project or 'third way' being espoused by New Labour. However, the underlying theme of all the policy developments is economic and oriented to work. This involves a rebalancing of home and work and the involvement of parents, especially mothers, in work rather than education or child care. The measures taken to achieve this have been both coercive and controlling and involve new methods of surveillance and regulation through standards. Whilst New Labour has developed a new direction for families in balancing home and work, this is fragmented and diverse and covers a variety of policies from education - early childhood through to lifelong learning - and social services, to fiscal measures, to health and welfare and finally involving the Home Office in new parenting initiatives. The balancing of home and work has become the central business of government in its various and diverse activities.     

Children as citizens: literacies for social participation

The last decade has seen, in the policy arena, a broad global push for children to be treated as active participants in society rather than as the passive recipients of adult decisions and interventions. The topic of literacy learning and teaching has, however, been absent from much of the policy and literature on children's social participation. This paper is an exploratory foray into possible connections between literacy and citizenship from the perspective of young children and those responsible for their education. Drawing from both sociocultural and semiotic perspectives on literacy, this analysis crosses between institutional texts, ethnographic accounts and children's own representations of their places in the world. A hierarchical model of literacy development, which emphasises the teaching of basic decoding skills in the early years, is associated with a view of young children as future citizens rather than as active social participants. Recognising children's agency, and supporting their meaningful participation, requires literacies of social participation.     

New Challenges and Opportunities for Lifelong Learning in South Africa

The imperatives for lifelong learning in South Africa are driven by its reinsertion into the global economy and by the social and political necessities of equity and redress after the years of colonialism, segregation and apartheid. It is therefore not surprising to find the discourse of lifelong learning infused into new policy documents. Utilizing Belanger's framework, which argues that lifelong learning is not a norm to prescribe but an empirical reality to analyze and reconstruct, the contexts for lifelong learning in South Africa are surveyed by focusing in on the state of initial education, adult education, and the learning environments. The framework, which acknowledges the daily lived realities of women and men, is a helpful way of retaining an holistic and integrated vision of lifelong learning and its humanistic, democratic goals. For lifelong learning in South Africa to deepen for more than a small group of well-educated, mainly urban, formally employed people, the author concludes that initial education, adult education and the learning environments of all the people will have to be improved. If this does not happen, then at least two polarized 'lifelong educations' will result.     

Social inclusion and active citizenship under the prism of neoliberalism: A critical analysis of the European Union’s discourse of lifelong learning

Abstract

The aim of this article is to investigate the impact neoliberalism has in shaping the discourse of the European Union’s policy of Lifelong Learning. The literature review initially presents the theoretical framework of neoliberalism as the dominant ideological and economic paradigm of our time. Thereafter, it takes a view on how neoliberalism perceives the four objectives of the European Union’s Lifelong Learning policy, namely employability/adaptability, personal fulfillment, social inclusion, and active citizenship. Through the analysis of European Commission’s policy documents on Lifelong Learning, this article explores whether these objectives, with focus on social inclusion and active citizenship, can be realized within the ideological, political, and economic framework set by the neoliberal paradigm. The data underwent Qualitative Analysis using the methods of Critical Discourse Analysis and Qualitative Content Analysis as well as Quantitative Analysis of textual data. The results indicate that only employability and adaptability seem to be compatible with the neoliberal rhetoric since the flexible and adaptable employee better serves the needs of the markets. The role neoliberalism holds for the individual is that of the consumer, product user, and voter. Therefore, the non-economic objectives of Lifelong Learning cannot be equally developed as they constitute the complete antithesis of neoliberalism’s basic principles.     

Africa and international policy making for lifelong learning: textual revelations

This paper discusses the relationship between international agendas for lifelong learning and financial aid for low income countries, especially those on the African continent. It argues that there are subtle differences in terminology written by policymakers respectively in Europe and South Africa for lifelong learning but that international development agendas reinscribe lifelong learning for countries in receipt of development aid. Taking a postcolonial perspective the paper provides a textual analysis of case examples from policy documents in two African countries to demonstrate how international aid priorities negatively affect government choices and policies for lifelong learning, in spite of more regional analyses of the role of education and lifelong learning for the continent's development needs. It argues that the inclusion of indigenous worldviews from the south have potential to enhance a global agenda for the social purpose element of lifelong learning.     

Lifelong learning and the Labour governments 1997–2004

Lifelong learning has been a key theme of New Labour’s education policy agenda since 1997, but is a broad and often amorphous concept. This article analyses New Labour’s ideological perspective in this context, outlines the main developments and difficulties, and evaluates the record over the seven years in office.

New Labour’s policy on lifelong learning can be divorced neither from its general education policy nor from its broader human capital approach to education, within an ideology of ‘marketised welfarism’. The article discusses these characteristics and notes both the continuities and differences between New Labour and traditional Labourism.     

Education Revised for a World in Transformation

The concept of lifelong learning, now a topic of world-wide urgency, has evolved markedly over time according to its historical, social and technological context. Today's requirement of repeated response to headlong technological innovation and global challenges of other kinds has transformed 'lifelong learning' from its old status as an optional extra for older people to a new role as an essential perspective in every phase of education. The pivot of that reorientation is to be found in a fresh concept of 'young adult' education, with repercussions throughout every educational system.     

The politics of ‘lifelong learning’ in post‐1997 Hong Kong

This article is concerned with the politics of lifelong learning policy in post‐1997 Hong Kong (HK). The paper is in four parts. Continuing Education, recast as ‘lifelong learning’, is to be the cornerstone of the post‐Handover education reform agenda. The lineaments of a familiar discourse are evident in the Education Commission policy documents. However, to view recent HK education policy just in terms of an apparent convergence with global trends would be to neglect the ways in which the discourse of lifelong learning has been tactically deployed to serve local political agendas. In the second part of this paper, I outline what Scott has called HK’s ‘disarticulated’ political system following its retrocession to China and attempts by an executive‐led administration to demonstrate ‘performance legitimacy’—through major policy reforms—in the absence of (democratic) political legitimacy. Beijing’s designation of HK as a (depoliticized) ‘economic’ city within greater China must also be taken into account. It is against this political background that the strategic deployment of a ‘lifelong learning’ discourse needs to be seen. In the third section of this paper, I examine three recent policy episodes to illustrate how lifelong learning discourse has been adopted and has evolved to meet changing circumstances in HK. Finally, I look at the issue of public consultation. The politics of education policy in HK may be seen to mirror at a micro‐level, the current macro‐level contested interpretations of HK’s future polity.