Lifelong learning: a policy concept with a long past but a short history

Abstract

This article examines the continuities and discontinuities in the international problematisation of education across the lifespan as an education policy, currently conceptualised as lifelong learning. Through the critical examination of international organisations’ policy documents, this paper demonstrates that while on the one hand there is a pattern in the way the problematisaton has been carried out (the continuities), on the other hand the translation of the problematisaton into policy has been punctuated by major discontinuities. Lifelong learning as a policy concept has introduced strong discontinuities that have ensured its acceptance worldwide: a policy with a small degree of political operationalisation that simultaneous discursively combines different political orientations.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the members of the ESREA Network on the History of Adult Education and Training in Europe, and especially to Anders Nilsson, who encouraged me to convert an early draft of this article into a publishable version. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their criticism. This research was funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology).

Notes

1. As Finger and Asún (2004) argue, the French concept of éducation permanente (EP) is that which best captures UNESCO’s views. Pineau (1977) points out that it is not a coincidence that Deleon, Gelpi, Lengrand, Dumazedier and Schwartz—authors normally held responsible for the formation and diffusion of UNESCO’s conception—were the principal protagonists of the French popular education movement Peuple et Culture. In fact, this is visible by, on the one hand, the use of the French term even in English texts or translations, and, on the other, by the inexistence of an unique term among the English texts, in which EP was indistinguishably termed continuing, permanent or lifelong education, or even lifelong learning (e.g., see the English introductions and summaries to Paul Lengrand’s texts in the Canadian journal of adult education Convergence, 1(4) and 3(2)). Even if there is a chronological Anglophone anteriority regarding the lifelong education idea, the authors of reference for UNESCO’s paradigm stem from the French adult education current. Nevertheless, lifelong education and éducation permanente are usually seen as the Anglophone and Francophone sides of the same coin. Therefore, leaving aside all the terminological quibbles, in this paper both terms are acknowledged as referring to the UNESCO’s conceptualisation of EAL as education policy. However, in the attempt to stress a clear distinction between the UNESCO’s conception and the early development in the field of adult education, éducation permanent is always employed when referring to UNESCO’s education policy.

2. This expression was primarily formulated by the first director‐general Julian Huxley, who stressed the general philosophy of UNESCO as being ‘a scientific world humanism, global in extent and evolutionary in background’ (Huxley 1946: 8).

3. The Council of Europe used the term ‘éducation permanente’ in the French documents, but translated it to English as ‘permanent education’. Those different translations may explain why Anglophone authors distinguish between UNESCO’s and the Council of Europe’s concepts, and referred to ‘permanent education’ as the first crystallised concept (e.g., Jourdan 1981, Kallen 2002). In contrast, French authors consider both conceptions as part of the same paradigm, but highlight that UNESCO was the first IO to formalise éducation permanente (e.g., Forquin 2002, Laot and Orly 2004).

I agree with the ‘Anglophone view’ that éducation permanente was treated differently in each IO; consequently I will use ‘permanent education’ when referring to the Council of Europe conception. However, I believe that the French authors may be right regarding the anteriority of UNESCO’s conceptualisation and that éducation permanente has remained mainly an UNESCO’s conception. In fact, as the paper demonstrates, on the one hand, the Council of Europe rapidly embraced the OECD’s recurrent education policy, while on the other hand, it was particularly under the auspices of UNESCO that the principal authors on éducation permanente have been published.

4. The Foundation was founded in Geneva in 1954 under the presidency of Robert Schuman. The idea came from Denis de Rougemont, who after founding a European Cultural Center in 1950, thought that it was an ‘opportune moment also to convene a “European club” of influential officials who were committed to unifying Europe, with the aim of forming a European cultural foundation which would support Europe‐oriented educational and cultural initiatives’ (Autissier 2004: 5).

5. Evidently, this shift was not only the result of the socio‐economic context, but rather arose from a convergence of discourses, which became more and more intertextualised. For instance, with Kolb and Mezirow, the individualisation of the ‘act of learning’ took place and research on ‘self‐directing learning’ or ‘autoformation’ emerged as the dominant subject of research. The private sector, realising the potential of conducting research on ‘learning issues’, became a research subject and proponent (e.g., by Argyris and Schön on the ‘theories of action’): as Le Goff (1996: 33) asserts, ‘Pedagogy became a matter of “engineering”’ (cf. e.g., Meignant 1986 and Panoramiques 19, 1995). The intertextuality between discourses seems to be irreversible as it is well illustrated by the concept ‘competence’, which emerged in the 1960s as a new model for managing the workforce (Dugué 1999) and was rapidly appropriated by both the political and the educational discourse (see Ropé and Tanguy 1994, Stroobants 1994, Centeno 2006).

6. In 1972, the first reports concerned Sweden, France, the Republic of Germany, the state of New York, Norway, and Yugoslavia; later the case studies (Developments in Recurrent Education 1976/77) included a broad number of countries: France, Japan, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Norway, Switzerland, Australia, Netherlands, New Zealand and Yugoslavia.

7. For instance, in the Final Report of the fifth UNESCO conference on Adult Education, Hamburg Conference (1997), 57 references were made to the expression ‘lifelong learning’ and only four to ‘lifelong education’. In The Hamburg Declaration on Adult Learning, presented at the same conference as a result of the project CONFINTEA V, ‘lifelong learning’ was mentioned 12 times and ‘lifelong education’ just once. UNESCO’s framework for action was, however, very different from the one planned by the EU.

8. Formal education concerns institutionalised educative situations that normally award a diploma/certificate (school, training courses, etc.); non‐formal education means activities with ‘educational objectives’ (organised) but not formalised (e.g., museum activities); and informal education consists of activities without educational objectives but that are nonetheless educational (e.g., leisure activities).