Include me out: critical readings of social exclusion,social inclusion and lifelong learning

Social exclusion and inclusion have emerged as strong policy-leading concepts at both the national and international level in recent years. Policies on lifelong learning are themselves in part premised on the contribution education and training can make to promoting an inclusive society. It is argued that social exclusion offends against human dignity, denies people their fundamental human rights and leads, in conjunction with social and economic instability, to marginalization and deepening inequalities, which threaten the stability of democracy. Social inclusion therefore appears to be an unconditional good. The argument in this paper suggests that this is not the case. Drawing on critical social policy studies and post-structuralist philosophy, we argue that the notion of inclusion relies on exclusions, some of which may be chosen and even desirable. We suggest that those interested in lifelong learning should take a more critical stance towards the social inclusion agenda to which it is being harnessed.     

Reimagining adult education and lifelong learning for all: Historical and critical perspectives

International Review of Education -     

Fiction,empathy and lifelong learning

The article aims to demonstrate that the impact of fiction on adult learning could be illuminated by a deeper engagement with research into empathy. It recognises that the lifelong learning literature acknowledges the importance of empathy in adult learning and that discussions of the role of fiction in adult learning often refer to fiction’s capacity to promote empathy. There is limited adult education literature exploring how fiction generates empathic feelings or how such feelings might lead to sustained changes in perceptions or actions. This article analyses an example of Hoffman’s work on empathy to illustrate the benefits of engagement with empathy research. This analysis leads to a consideration of fiction’s capacity to promote an involuntary empathy that can help adult learners develop deeper understandings of difference and of excluded groups. It also shows that an understanding of the factors that inhibit the development of empathy and enable individuals to justify the sufferings of others could be of value to educators. Finally it suggests that Hoffman’s examination of conditions that lead to empathic anger is helpful for educators wanting to use the potential of fiction to encourage and promote action in the cause of social justice.     

演进与质变：从终身教育到终身学刁

终身学习是在新的时代背景下对终身教育的继承和超越。从终身教育到终身学习的转变是一种质的飞跃，终身学习是对时代发展要求的应答，它实现了整个教育的重心转移，保证了终身教育制度的有效实施，更符合学习化社会的要求。     

The learning society as itself: lifelong learning,individualization of learning,and beyond education

This paper considers the bottom-up vision of the learning society. Unlike the top-down approach, the bottom-up approach does not start by specifying the purposes of learning which should direct the development of the learning society, but from observing interactions among learning individuals as agents. While in the relevant literature and policies much attention has been devoted to certain positions on how one's learning should respond to current change, this paper proposes that when considering the establishment and development of the learning society we should not dismiss the understanding of how individuals, concrete beings, act as they learn, since how they do so has an impact on the way in which learning is structured. This bottom-up approach has to be taken into account, for it helps us to come near to what is embedded in learning practices, and to react pertinently when we need to come to terms with substantive issues for the development of the learning society. Three aspects—lifelong learning, the individualization of learning, and learning beyond education—serve as the context for understanding what characterize the practices of the learning society.     

Learning to live: the relationship between lifelong learning and lifelong illness

This article draws a parallel between nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century promotion of self‐help learning; it notes that aim and outcome can be socialization rather than social advancement, order if not autonomy; it indicates ill‐informed advocates can ask too much of the adult learner and give too little; it gives evidence that successful self‐help schemes have rarely if ever been based on self‐help alone. In all the article challenges the morality and financial wisdom of promoting a concept without a full understanding and consideration of both the concept and the adult learner.     

Gender and physics: feminist philosophy and science education

Physics education reform movements should pay attention to feminist analyses of gender in the culture of physics for two reasons. One reason is that feminist analyses contribute to an understanding of a ‘chilly climate’ women encounter in many physics university departments. Another reason is that feminist analyses reveal that certain styles of doing science are predominant in the culture of physics. I introduce recent philosophical work in social epistemology to argue that the predominance of certain styles of doing science is not good for science. Scientific communities would benefit from greater diversity in styles of doing science.

Values education and lifelong learning: principles,policies and programmes

Abstract

For education to be moral enough, its goal is defined not as to help individuals to learn the life ideals of church or state (which means centuries of practice whereby a group of individuals is trying to impose these ideals upon another group) but to create moral individuals‐‐people who are willing and able to treat each other as equals, and who are willing and able to feel compassion towards one another. Consideration is given to lessons from psychotherapy about the potential of autonomous human individual development for programmes of social change, in order for these programmes to be carried out without government and education resorting to imposition of the life ideals presupposed by them. In conclusion recognition is given to a trend of ethical thought, revitalising the moral significance of responsiveness to the reality of other people, grounded in the virtue of care for particular people. Adding the virtues of care and compassion to the virtues of impartiality and fairness offers a much deeper understanding of the moral grounds of society in its communitarian aspects, as evidenced by Solidarity as the social movement of the early 1980s in Poland.     

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.