The aims of lifelong learning through the dynamic of ambition

Abstract

This article addresses the personal negotiations that lead individuals to pursue adult education. Analysing this process determines ambitions pursued, and thus makes it possible to identify how the individuals involved perceive their desired future as an improvement. This study found that ambitions were negotiated in order to make them acceptable to the individuals themselves, but that their negotiation also involved others; at the same time, it examined the aims and constraints implied by the process. This negotiation process draws on norms and rules related to the search for a better work–life balance. Three types of ambition were identified as models for negotiating the social organisation of time. The paper concludes with the benefits of studying ambition for the field of adult education, and on the potential contribution that can be made by considering these programmes as a support in the construction of identities, even though this aspect tends to be diminished by neoliberal hegemony regarding adult training programmes.

Keywords:

• Ambition
• decision-making
• meaning of work
• training
• work–life balance

Notes

1. The theory of political ambition examines how structural effects (political organization, size of a territory, amount of competition) affect the rational calculations made by candidates regarding the costs, personal benefit and likelihood of success in getting involved in an electoral campaign. Among the main references, see for example Black (1972); Rohde (1979).

2. The corpus of 44 adults was constituted from June 2008 to September 2009. All of them were volunteers who accepted the interview after one or two requests from myself in the classroom where I was authorised to go by the association direction. The main difficulty was in fact to find a free time of three hours, as each interview lasted an average time of 2h30. So, the interviews have been conducted generally in the training centre, in the evening after the study hours and sometimes in the Friday afternoon which was free. Forty-two of the adults were job seekers (equally divided between those who ‘strategically’ became unemployed to receive funding for their training project; individuals who had alternated short-term contracts and unemployment; and those ‘forced’ into unemployment) and 2 people received the CIF. The CIF, or congés individual de formation, is a scheme in France that provides funding for applicants who decide to go back to school or get full-time job training. It is financed by taxes on companies. Ten of the trainees were under 26 (including 3 women); 12 were between 26 and 30 years old (2 women); 11 were between 30 and 40 years old (1 woman); 8 were between 40 and 50 years old (2 women); 3 were between 50 and 60 years old (1 woman). Less than one-fifth of those interviewed did not have a secondary school diploma; roughly half had a secondary school diploma; and nearly one third had a post-secondary qualification.

3. Defined here as a chain of voluntary and coordinated actions taken to fulfil an ambition.