Abstract
Education is a crucial element in having a good life – it is valued because of its intrinsic worth in human flourishing and its instrumental value in generating economic opportunities and achieving human rights. Not surprisingly, the right to education is enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Moreover, in advanced modern economies, not having a good education and high level skills reduces one’s economic, social and political participation. I am here concerned more specifically with early adulthood, because it can influence lifetime development; choices become cumulative over time and mobility declines with age, so that advantages (or disadvantages) in early adulthood continue to influence lifelong learning capability, throughout life (Yacub 2008). Moreover, research by Iacovou and Aassve (2007) shows that young Europeans in their late teens and early twenties are at a higher risk of poverty than all other groups except for children and older people. It follows that education and training policies and systems need to be transformed to better meet the needs of young people in education, supporting them in making good decisions and choices to make the transition into the labour market (Cedefop 2010), but also to equip them as confident lifelong learners and democratic citizens.
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Acknowledgements
My thanks to the two anonymous referees whose comments helped in improving this chapter. An earlier version of this paper was presented as an invited paper for the conference on ‘Human Development, Education and Vulnerable Youth’, Pavia, 28–29 May 2010. My thanks to Anna Sabadash for her helpful comments.
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Walker, M. (2012). Egalitarian Policy Formulation in Lifelong Learning: Two Models of Lifelong Education and Social Justice for Young People in Europe. In: Aspin, D., Chapman, J., Evans, K., Bagnall, R. (eds) Second International Handbook of Lifelong Learning. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2360-3_13
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