A Brief Genealogy Of Lifelong Learning

Lifelong learning looks like a good thing then. It resonates with the notions of renewal, of keeping up to date in a rapidly changing world. Yet as Field (2005) points out lifelong learning is difficult for policy makers to embrace. Procedurally lifelong learning cuts across government sectoral boundaries. It is for example not only concerned with supply to the labour market but demand — human resource development in drag as Boshier (1998) put it. It is also concerned with social justice because few now dispute the claims that those who have benefited most from learning tend to want more of it and that their continuing interest in formal learning has served them very nicely. Lifelong learning is not amenable to target setting and the audit culture (Apple 2005). It is not amenable to short term measurable objectives. Tying money in with soft objectives is not attractive to government concerned with value for money in the public sector. Yet there was a time, which Wain (2004: Ch 1) documents and which was reviewed in chapter one, when utopian visions of lifelong learning were popular and appeared to be attractive to international organisations. As this chapter explains, however, the attractions of a version of lifelong learning as vocational education soon came to the fore and it remains currently dominant. This version has considerable legitimacy through its espoused measurability of inputs and outputs. Much of it may be delivered though Vocational Education and Training (VET) Colleges which may be regarded as the most amenable education sector to bring about change. In Australia these are commonly known as Technical and Further Education (TAFE) Colleges and in the UK, simply as Further Education (FE). Moreover powerful institutions such as the World Bank are attracted to a deterministic human capital model of learning rather than what might appear to them as ‘woolly’ notions of social and cultural capital.