A critique of Peter Jarvis’s conceptualisation of the lifelong learner in the contemporary cultural context

Abstract

This paper examines Peter Jarvis’s conceptualisation of lifelong learners, who are seen as being the individual products of their learning engagements, constrained by their individual biological potentials. They are presented as seeking existentially authentic resolution to dialectically oppositional disjunctures between their individual biographies and their lived experience, in and of the prevailing socio-cultural context. That context, though, is seen as requiring inauthentic learning and thus as being a significantly oppositional presence, calling on the individual to resolve, through learning, the disjunctures that it presents. Although the articulated view that all learning is of this form is less than persuasive, the strongly existentialist and humanistic view of the learner is stimulating and appealing. It says important things about learning and its relationship to the human condition, standing as an oppositional irritant to the prevailing hegemony of instrumentally behaviouristic theories of (lifelong) learning: holding them to account by its own standards.

Keywords:

• Existentialism
• learners
• philosophy of education
• lifelong learning
• humanism
• cultural context

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.