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Lifelong learning: Foundational models, underlying assumptions and critiques

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Abstract

Lifelong learning has become a catchword in almost all countries because of its growing influence on education policies in the globalised world. In the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU), the promotion of lifelong learning has been a strategy to speed up economic growth and become competitive. For UNESCO and the World Bank, lifelong learning has been a novel education model to improve educational policies and programmes in developing countries. In the existing body of literature on the topic, various models of lifelong learning are discussed. After reviewing a number of relevant seminal texts by proponents of a variety of schools, this paper argues that the vast number of approaches are actually built on two foundational models, which the author calls the “human capital model” and the “humanistic model”. The former aims to increase productive capacity by encouraging competition, privatisation and human capital formation so as to enhance economic growth. The latter aims to strengthen democracy and social welfare by fostering citizenship education, building social capital and expanding capability.

Résumé

Apprentissage tout au long de la vie : modèles de base, hypothèses sous-jacentes et critiques – L’apprentissage tout au long de la vie est devenu un mot d’ordre dans presque tous les pays en raison de son influence croissante sur les politiques éducatives dans un monde planétarisé. Pour l’Organisation de Coopération et de Développement Économiques (OCDE) et pour l’Union européenne (UE), promouvoir l’apprentissage tout au long de la vie est une stratégie censée accélérer la croissance économique et améliorer la compétitivité. Pour l’UNESCO et la Banque mondiale, il constitue un modèle éducatif original susceptible d’améliorer les politiques et programmes éducatifs dans les pays en développement. Divers modèles d’apprentissage tout au long de la vie sont présentés dans le corpus de documentation existant sur le sujet. Après avoir recensé plusieurs textes majeurs rédigés par des adeptes de divers établissements scolaires, l’auteur avance que le grand nombre d’approches dans le domaine reposent finalement sur deux modèles de base, qu’il appelle « modèle capital humain » et « modèle humanitaire ». Le premier vise à augmenter la capacité productive en encourageant la concurrence, la privatisation et la création d’un capital humain de sorte à soutenir la croissance économique. Le second tend à renforcer la démocratie et la protection sociale en valorisant l’éducation à la citoyenneté, la création d’un capital social et l’extension des capacités.

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Notes

  1. The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is a 1995 treaty of the World Trade Organization (WTO) which was created to extend multilateral trading from the trade of merchandise to the trade of services.

  2. Sarvodaya, from sarva “all” + udaya “prosperity”, and shiksha “learning/instruction” (Sanskrit). A very rough translation would thus be “educational progress for all”.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Kjell Rubenson and Maren Elfert, University of British Columbia, for their feedback on an earlier draft of this paper. Acknowledgements also go to anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and to Maya Kiesselbach, International Review of Education, for editing the paper.

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  1. Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z2, Canada

    Kapil Dev Regmi

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Regmi, K.D. Lifelong learning: Foundational models, underlying assumptions and critiques. Int Rev Educ 61, 133–151 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-015-9480-2

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