Lifelong education research over 40 years: insights from the International Journal of Lifelong Education

With this special issue of the International Journal of Lifelong Education, we complete a two-year celebration and critical examination of the field of adult lifelong education, prompted by the journal’s fortieth anniversary. In this editorial we provide a brief account of this celebration and its rationale, but also devote attention to the origins and early years of the journal itself. This involves reporting some recollections of two of the three men who edited the journal over its first sixteen years. It also involves reflecting on some notable developments, ‘turns’ and events in the academic field of adult education during that period, and the journal’s relationship to them. We then introduce the contents of the special issue itself: five articles and two review essays that draw on and analyse aspects of the work published in the journal over four decades. Finally, we reflect briefly on the journal’s aims, and the challenges of keeping them alive.

We have set out much of the background and rationale to our fortieth anniversary ‘project’ in two previous editorials (Holford et al., 2021, 2022); some of the results have been presented in our earlier special issue, Forty Years of the International Journal of Lifelong Education: Reflections on a Changing Field (Volume 41, No. 1). As we explained, the special issues emerged from discussions among the editors and editorial advisory board. These raised various issues. Some concerned readership and audience, the framing of outputs from the research, and when, amongst whom, and into what context these might ‘land’. How has ‘the field’ changed? How far is the journal Anglocentric or ‘international’? What would be the critical issues of the time when we came to publish? In what ways might adult lifelong education – and research into it over the past forty years – contribute to solutions to the human race’s systemic problems?

A second area of discussion concerned how and what should be covered: there was, for example, a long discussion as to how the period since 1981 was best divided up temporally: in the end we considered it as four decades, partly faute de mieux, but also because such a division, albeit arbitrary, might draw attention to ‘absences’ as well as ‘presences’, and require us to notice things that – with today’s concerns – we might otherwise overlook. As we proceeded, we did indeed spot geographical, racial, social, absences, as well as the varying presence or absence of various ‘voices’. At the same time, we have recognised trends or ‘long lines’, extending over several decades.

Further concerns included revisiting ‘past futures’: reflecting on what we (or our predecessors) had imagined, or hoped, or feared, the future might be like. What did they see, ignore or overlook? In what ways did they prove correct or mistaken, and what might we learn from this? At the same time, we wanted to recognise the (external) events and forces that had shaped the journal and the field. We anticipated that these might include – to adopt unfashionable Marxist terminology – ‘material base’ and ‘ideological superstructure’, and political or ‘natural’ events of global significance. Examples include ‘globalisation’, whether considered as theoretical perspective, ideology, or reality (the journal’s production processes are now divided between the USA, the UK, and India); the fall of the USSR and ‘actually existing socialism’; German unification; the European Union; the rise – and framing – of ‘Asia’ (Japan, China); theoretical turns and fashions (e.g. postmodernism and ‘discourse’, feminism, decoloniality); methodological turns and fashions; wars; climate crisis; and so forth.

Finally, our discussions reflected on the changing shape of the field, and the position of the journal in it. We considered questions about what ‘the field’ of adult education has comprised over four decades. How have its key actors (people, institutions, etc.) changed? How has it been affected by developments in academic publishing? What books have mattered to our authors? How has the way people ‘read the journal’ changed? (Who now takes a bound volume from their library shelf, or goes there to catch up on the latest issue?) Is the notion of ‘an issue’ – considered as a whole, ‘special’ or regular – still meaningful, when we commonly download (decontextualised) single articles? How has the relationship between the academic or scientific field on the one hand, and the practice of adult lifelong education by professionals of various kinds, activists in social movements, and so forth, on the other, evolved?

Adult education was far from new as a field of practice when the International Journal of Lifelong Education was founded in the early 1980s. Although one or two universities had begun to offer courses in the subject as early as the 1920s, qualifications remained few, and theory was thin. The field’s archaeologists, digging far back, will now recognise fragments in Aristotle and Confucius; and the likes of Comenius, Erasmus and Grundtvig were leading figures in its prehistory. But even in the 1960s and 1970s, there was little theory. If the American Association for Adult Education’s ‘black book’ (Jensen et al., 1964) was a landmark – read across the English-speaking world – today it serves to illustrate the embryonic state of scholarship and research. This is brought home when we recall that Malcolm Knowles was probably the most widely read adult education ‘theorist’; his idea of andragogy had significant traction, and was widely considered a major contribution (Knowles, 1973, 1980).

The founding editors of this journal – Peter Jarvis and J.E. (Teddy) Thomas – sought to enrich the theoretical foundations of the subject. As one of them was to write, ‘practical activity which has no theory underpinning it can look suspiciously as though it is trivial and therefore expendable’ (Thomas, 1998, p. 47). They contributed in many ways. This journal was, we think, one of the most important, but among their other ‘projects’ both (separately) tried to extend and deepen knowledge about the people who had contributed ‘knowledge’ to the field. Thus Jarvis (1987) identified thirteen ‘twentieth century thinkers’ (drawn largely from England and North America – Ettore Gelpi and Paulo Freire were the two exceptions). Thomas was working in parallel on an International Biography of Adult Education (Thomas & Elsey, 1985).

The journal’s origins

The first issue of the International Journal of Lifelong Education appeared in early 1982. The editors included no grand founding statement, nor even an editorial. Instead they led with a very brief – two paragraph – ‘Preface’ by Torsten Husén (1982). (Ironically in the light of the sometimes fierce debates over the field’s, and the journal’s, name that have populated the journal’s subsequent life, this addressed the idea of ‘lifelong learning’ rather than ‘lifelong education’.) In a recent interview, Teddy Thomas offered his recollections of the journal’s origins and early years. Asked about how it all began, he recalled that

it was Peter [Jarvis] who got Taylor and Francis (or Falmer Press actually, at the time) interested. And that took a bit of doing, but the two people at the Press were very sympathetic, and we convinced them that in fact it would work. It was intended to be a serious journal. … [T]here were some other [adult education] journals as you know, … and these were fine, but … they tended not to be sufficiently academic. So this [journal] seemingly filled a gap. And after a lot of very nice meals in London, it was eventually published. (Thomas, 2022)

The absence of any grand statement is by no means, therefore, evidence of absence of purpose. Teddy explained that his own involvement stemmed from a discussion between Peter Jarvis and Michael Stephens, then the Robert Peers Professor of Adult Education at Nottingham University. Stephens

was fanatical in his wish to develop theories of adult education. He wanted to develop a theoretical base and he was well known for it. … [H]e had a national reputation for wanting to sharpen up the theory. So when Peter was looking around for allies, Michael was clearly one of his first ports of call. Michael was extremely busy at the time. And he asked me if I’d take an interest in it, which … I was very glad to do. (Thomas, 2022)

And asked about why the word international was included in the journal’s title, Teddy commented:

that was part of the idea of trying to develop universal theories, … which would apply in South Africa, United States, [etc.], rather than the parochial kind of narrow interest that tended to be reflected in, for example, meetings of the Universities Council of [Adult] Education in Britain, which … only had time really to think about parochial interests. So the idea was to internationalise the field. And in fact, I think it’s fair to say in passing that it was very successful in that because it brought together people from all over the world, the common interest in developing ideas and theories often physically meeting each other and making opportunities to. … [T]hat was the idea of ‘international’ (Thomas, 2022).

It is, Teddy wrote many years ago, a ‘particular problem’ for the scholarship of adult education that the field ‘is above all dominated by practice, and by practitioners’ (Thomas, 1998, p. 47). He was referring in particularly to challenges he and Barry Elsey had encountered in compiling their International Biography of Adult Education, but the point can be applied more widely. On the one hand, what we know about what Aristotle or Erasmus thought about adult education is principally theoretical: our understanding of what adult education practice was like in their times is fragmentary at best. On the other, many who practise adult education in ways that have a profound influence on the lives of their students, and perhaps use original or innovative approaches, make little of no attempt to describe what they do. This illustrates the eternal tension between practice and theory: practice – as, ironically, we know from theorists (Argyris & Schön, 1974; Polanyi, 1958, 1966) – is notoriously hard to describe; and of course the very act of describing it, at least if done successfully, transforms it into ‘theory’.

Editing the early journal

Despite their thirst for theory, the first editors of the journal were very much practitioners. Peter Jarvis and Teddy Thomas were both practising teachers of adults; Teddy was also an educational leader and administrator (deputy head of Nottingham’s Department of Adult Education when the journal started). But editing a journal is a practice in itself, and it is worth reflecting on the continuities and contrasts between editing a journal in the 1980s and the 2020s. Teddy recalled that

either of us [the two editors] would receive a submission. We would then meet regularly, discuss the submission and [make a decision]. … It was pretty obvious which articles were good. … [E]ventually people didn’t send articles that they thought wouldn’t get in … because they weren’t sufficiently rigorous or something. (Thomas, 2022)

The editors would read every article, but they were committed from the outset to ‘blind’ peer review. ‘Always … we would always have reviews … sent blind – it was all very properly done actually. … Everything was reviewed.’ Asked if they would ever publish an article they as editors liked, but reviewers did not, Teddy thought not. They might be strategic in their choice of referees (‘I mean, as you know, … some reviewers are fairer than others’) but if one said a piece was not ‘of any interest or value that would be it.’ Because ‘not only would that be unjust, it would be pointless. And furthermore, it would alienate the reviewers’ (Thomas, 2022).

At their meetings, the editors would then ‘sort out the next eight articles, agree on them, and publish them’. Eight articles in the 1980s and 1990s would have been enough for two issues – complemented, as they always were, by a brief editorial (often less than a page long) and book reviews. For the journal’s first fifteen years, its Reviews Editor was John Davies. The story of his ‘recruitment’ is told by Teddy Thomas:

the first reviews editor we chose – whose name I now, unfortunately forget, but it’s in the records– … we found to be, I fear unreliable. … He didn’t produce the copy, … so Peter and I said, do we know of anybody else? Peter couldn’t think of anybody else at that time. I knew John Davies, well, I knew that he was very literate and very reliable. And if he said he would take it on, he would do it. And that’s exactly what he did. He was a great success. (Thomas, 2022)

The editors’ aim to be ‘international’ was, as Teddy has told us, in part a repudiation of parochialism: their experience of adult education was British. Both Peter Jarvis and Teddy Thomas worked in British university extra-mural departments. The main work of such departments was to teach courses for adults – typically courses of ‘liberal’ adult education, open to all, regardless of educational background, and leading to no formal qualification. Academic staff taught such courses, and arranged many others. John Davies’s professional background also lay in British university adult education’s provision of courses for the adult community. He was the Librarian in the University of Nottingham’s Department of Adult Education: like other ‘extra-mural’ departments, it maintained its own library, sending out ‘book-boxes’ (small libraries of texts selected by tutors) to classes across the region where the university provided courses. In the 1970s and 1980s, there were around 400 of these each year; providing this support for liberal adult education classes, and for the best part of thirty years ensuring the department’s library was suitably stocked, was John’s principal role.

Although teaching about adult education was a minority pursuit in such departments, generally originating in the need to train their own part-time tutors, the Nottingham department offered diploma and Master’s level courses. Amongst much else, John Davies’s library also supported these. Unlike most journal reviews editors, therefore – and unlike all his successors on the International Journal of Lifelong Education – he was not an academic, but he had close interactions with academics about their scholarly interests, and he was alive to trends in book publishing. He described his work for the journal. He would subscribe to publishers’ catalogues.

And at that time there was a publication called The Bookseller, which at the back listed every book published in England during that week … divided by subject. So you could look up under Education. … [Then] I wrote publishers and said, you’ve just published this … [and] nine times out of ten, they would send it. … [T]hey obviously thought that if you’re clued up to know what’s being published, then it’s probably worth sending the copy. (Davies, 2022)

When he had got ‘a system’ going, John recalls that it ‘seemed to be okay’. ‘It was not often that I couldn’t produce nine or ten reviews for each [issue of the] journal.’ To collect names of potential reviewers he ‘looked through education journals. … So and so has written an article on that.’ He ‘had a sort of reliable cadre of about half a dozen people who would review anything quite quickly’ though – ‘you soon found out who were reliable and who weren’t and just occasionally I had to write a very rude letter saying, “are you going to do this or not?”.’ But his recollection was that of the books he sent out, a review would be returned for ‘nine out of ten’. Sometimes ‘a bit of nudging’ was required, but ‘mostly they did them’ (Davies, 2022).

One of John’s asides (‘I wouldn’t know what an e-book was’) points to one way in which the world of publishing, and the role of the review editor, have changed. Another brings out how performance indicators have come to dominate academic life: ‘the great incentive [to reviewers] was the fact that they could put this down on their publications’ (Davies, 2022). Today, in too many countries and institutions, book reviewing counts for little.

The evolving field

When Jarvis and Thomas began editing the journal, they were not to know that what one later called ‘the Thatcher pestilence’ (Thomas, 2017) would frame not only its first years, but its first forty. ‘Thatcherism’ is now widely recognised as an early, if local and specific, expression of neoliberalism; and neoliberalism has become the hegemonic force of our times. So if the first editors’ aim of strengthening ‘theory’ in adult education has clearly been achieved – and few comparing the contents of the journal in its first five years with its most recent five could deny that there is more ‘theory’ now, or that it is more elaborate and explicit – it has been achieved in a neoliberal world. In short, the scholars writing in the journal have been doing so in (and responding to) an environment remarkably different from their predecessors’. And for the same fundamental reasons – though in ways that have varied in detail by time and location – the nature of scholarship and scholarly activity in adult education has changed.

It is worth recalling that the bulk of the scholars with whom the journal’s first editors interacted were not academic specialists in adult or lifelong education. They were men and women who taught adults history, sociology, economics, psychology, literature, industrial relations, and so forth. The study of adult education was therefore deeply bound up with academics’ personal immersion in its practice. Adult education systems varied, of course, from country to country, but this intermingling of personal experience of practice with diversity of scholarship was widespread – under labels such as extension or adult or continuing education – across the English-speaking world.

One consequence of this was that the topics addressed in the journal were ‘pretty eclectic’; as Teddy put it, ‘the question really was, does this article add anything to what’s already been said or done?’ The articles, he continued, could address

anything. It could be on the problems of adult learners; it could be on the history of adult education in France, … anything that was or would be of interest to somebody who was interested in ideas. Because at that time you had … problems in interesting professional educators in any kind of theory or background or history, which is that they were often subject orientated. So they were lecturers in local history or in psychology or something. So they might not be interested, particularly in the purpose of adult education. They were much more interested in their own subject. (Thomas, 2022)

A few universities developed specialist units, even departments, researching and teaching about adult education, staffed by a band of scholars supporting masters and doctoral programmes. (Teddy Thomas and Michael Stephens were key to Nottingham’s unit, while Peter Jarvis led rapid developments at Surrey focusing particularly on educators in nursing and similar professions.) But these were relatively few, and even they interacted closely with colleagues teaching courses for adults in other subjects.

In a manner probably inconceivable to Jarvis, Thomas, and everyone else, when they established the journal, all this was – to use a term now fashionable – radically disrupted within a decade or so. In Teddy Thomas’s memory, the journal’s early content inevitably reflected the political, policy and research interests of those who wrote for it. He recalls ‘a strong flavour of history [and] … of the political purpose of adult education’:

at that time you had people like Thatcher and Reagan who were forever attacking the idea that adult education might contribute something, which they didn’t want contributing … . They particularly of course – including the Labour Party – didn’t want an educated lot of mine workers and the contribution of adult education in this country to the education of mine workers and other factory workers … some would claim, and I would go along with this, made a substantial difference. (Thomas, 2022)

The pressures came from various angles; they played out in varying ways: but in retrospect we can recognise changes in funding regimes associated with new public management; the growth of the pseudo-vocationalism that put at a discount all education that did not directly improve a person’s job prospects (Grubb, 1996); the belief that all learning could be organised in ‘bits’ (modules and the like), and specified in advance by defined learning outcomes and measured; the view that learning contracts (particularly favoured, of course, by Knowles (1986)) and market-based ‘choice’ were a better and more ‘democratic’ way of engaging with students than discussion; the remarkable ideological rupture – discrediting even its strongest critics on the left – associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

One of the present authors recalls a conference – in fact, more an extended residential workshop, involving a relatively small number of adult educators, largely from the English-speaking world in Canmore, Alberta, in mid-1995 (Collins, 1995). Both Peter Jarvis and Teddy Thomas were there. The organiser, Michael Collins of the University of Saskatchewan, had arranged more than the normal helping of extra-curricular fun. The proceedings were nonetheless serious. Michael Welton recalled the ‘mood’ as ‘morose’: ‘Many were pronouncing the end – Budd Hall and Kathy Rockhill spoke of upheavals and chaos at OISE’; Welton himself ‘told the gloomy story of how the School of Education had been closed at Dalhousie University.’ (Welton, 2011, p. 5) Richard Edwards and Robin Usher made themselves unpopular by what seemed a precipitate retreat into postmodernism, playfully – it could seem even gleefully – tossing aside adult educators’ sense that they worked in a field: it was rather, in a metaphor they rehearsed often around that time, a ‘moorland’ (Edwards, 1997; Usher et al., 1997). Fields are ploughed and cultivated; crops flourish by human design. No-one decides what – if anything – flourishes on moorland. Adult educators, by implication, should not be surprised if their seeds fell on stony ground, nor, indeed, if the fields they tended were overrun by the forces of nature.

Yet just a few years earlier, also in Canada, one of the journal’s editors had been a party to (though not actually involved in) a remarkable, even legendary, contretemps: a symposium at the annual North American Adult Education Research Conference on ‘Our Historical Possibilities: Evolution and Future of Adult Education as a Field of Study’ (Peters et al., 1992). The panel speakers had all contributed to a book, Adult Education: Evolution and Achievements in a Developing Field of Study (Peters & Jarvis, 1991), conceived and promoted as a successor to the American Association for Adult Education’s ‘black book’ (Jensen et al., 1964). (Peter Jarvis, the handbook’s junior editor, was absent, having shortly before been called to head the Surrey department in one of those moments of organisational crisis and restructuring that were to become so frequent.) Of this symposium, Michael Welton recalled that

the inimitable New Zealander Michael Law thundered out in defence of Marxist orientations to adult learning. At the 1992 meeting held in Saskatoon, a panel discussion on the new “black book” … was basically shouted down as members in the audience railed against those who had excluded women and blacks [sic] from the text. Several panel participants never returned to another Adult Education Research Conference (AERC) or CASAE [Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education] meeting. (Welton, 2011, p. 5)

These adult educators felt their agency mattered; their field was worth fighting for. Yet this encounter was also a sign of the times. The vanities of adult education (the adult education professoriate in particular is susceptible to such vanities) may be tickled by the notion that ‘we’ change the world, but – to paraphrase John Donne – no field is an island. Adult educators, in different ways in different places, have long been deeply engaged in social movements; what they learn in their involvement has changed both their practice and theory. In the 1970s and 1980s, many were deeply influenced by the women’s movement, by feminist theories, by black studies (now critical race studies), and by parallel shifts in disciplines such as sociology, history, and cultural studies. At the same time the characteristics of adult educators, of adult students, and of adult education academics, were themselves in flux: adult education, for instance, helped many women to become occupationally and socially mobile; some of the students achieved occupational mobility by becoming teachers of adults.

There is little question but that the outrage expressed at the 1992 AERC – or the intellectual and social movements from which it sprang – had an impact: subsequent editions of the AAACE’s handbook have been significantly more diverse in their authorship and focus (Kasworm et al., 2010; Rocco et al., 2021; Wilson & Hayes, 2000b), while the 2000 edition (Wilson & Hayes, 2000b) began with a chapter by the editors devoted to the history of AAACE handbooks (Wilson & Hayes, 2000a). Quite soon, publishers more generally had identified a growing market for ‘handbooks’: as they proliferated in various forms (e.g. Aspin et al. (2012), Aspin et al. (2001), Evans et al. (2021), Jarvis (2009), Jarvis and Watts (2012), and Milana et al. (2018)), the (US) professional association’s version no longer ‘defined the field’ in quite the same way as it formerly had.

The new handbooks, by and large, identified the ‘field’ as ‘lifelong learning’, rather than adult education, and their shifting foci show what the two ‘Canadian’ occasions also illustrate: that the journal has been part of a turbulent field of study. It has had to respond to its turbulent times: to global and local forces; to unforeseen events; to the birth, collapse, and rebirth of theories, ideologies and movements; to the invention, adoption and spread of technologies, especially digital technologies; to the agency of world leaders and institutional managers; to their initiatives, achievements and blunders. It is, however, sadly a matter of historical fact that armies and battles generally turn both field and moorland to waste – ‘collateral damage’ is the current euphemism – trampling down crops, regardless of the care that has gone into their cultivation. Gatherings of adult education researchers in more recent years exhibit commitment and principle, but seldom the identification with adult education practice that was being lost in the 1990s. Scholarship and science are now more separated from practice: when adult education scholars seek to influence practice, they are now more commonly expected to think of doing so through the transmission belt of ‘policymakers’. This seems to mean that they debate principle, or engage in ideologically-informed debate, less at the level of pedagogical practice, and more at the level of policy. And to influence policy, it is supposed, ‘policy-oriented surveys … such as PIAAC warrant more legitimacy than classical issues of exploring, or advocating for, democracy, social rights and justice’ (Nylander et al., 2022, p. 40).

Forty years on

For forty years, the journal has tried to encourage the development of theory, and its volumes therefore provide a basis for reflection on how the theoretical side of adult lifelong education has evolved, and into the changing nature of adult education practice. Some changes will, of course, be little surprise, reflecting broader shifts in culture and ideology. Gender is a prominent case: little more than a decade was required for Jarvis to realise, for instance, that a second edition of his Twentieth Century Thinkers (Jarvis, 2001) must include more women – though as Leicester (2001) rued in her own contribution, in the event they featured more as authors of chapters about men than as ‘thinkers’ in their own right. With the passage of time, the editorial group – comprising the editors, the reviews editor, and for the last few years a social media editor – has not only expanded, but shifted its gender balance (from entirely male to predominantly female). The national locations of the editors have shifted: for three decades they were entirely based within England (though Teddy Thomas is a Welsh-speaking Welshman); since 2010 they have also been drawn from Canada, Australia, Denmark, Italy; from 2023 Germany will also be represented. They no longer meet three or four times a year in London; days away and leisurely rail journeys have been replaced by fortnightly (or even weekly) online meetings, squeezed into packed daily schedules and barely-compatible time-zones. Yet whatever their individual beliefs and ideologies, there have been few if any serious spats among the editors. Teddy Thomas described relations among the editors as ‘felicitous’; the present editors could enter a similar judgment.

This special issue

The contributors to this special issue explore the changing field of adult lifelong education, drawing on the content of the International Journal of Lifelong Education. The commitment of the journal – and its editors – to incisive research, advanced scholarship and critical scholarly debate remains steadfast. It comprises five articles authored, for the most part, by editors and members of the editorial advisory board. In the first, ‘Shaping the field of lifelong education through three critical debates in the International Journal of Lifelong Education’, John Holford, Marcella Milana, Susan Webb, Richard Waller, Steven Hodge, and Elizabeth Knight describe how they took the opportunity to explore how the 1,462 articles included in the first 40 volumes questioned and shaped the field. The article explains the approach taken, focussing on three topics (citizenship and its learning; learning in, through and for work; and widening participation and higher education), which delineate fundamental debates of lifelong education and reveal how the journal’s authors have contributed to those debates. The authors indicate how the field is evolving, showing that research and theory need to remain vigilant, critical and robust if the field is to continue as a site of hope for future citizens, workers and students – or instead be appropriated as an object for measurement, calculation and deployment for relatively narrow, less-than-human interests.

‘The debate on intergovernmental organisations and adult learning and education policies: intersections between the political and scientific fields’ by Licínio C. Lima, Paula Guimarães & Borut Mikulec discusses the scientific debate held in the International Journal of Lifelong Education over four decades concerning intergovernmental organisations and adult learning and education policies. They use a field-analytical perspective based on a systematic literature review of articles published in the journal, and qualitative content analysis. Their findings emphasise the relative autonomy of adult learning and education as a scientific subfield, although they stress the need to strengthen critical reflection in order to avoid interpretative perspectives imposed by international governmental organisations’ policy discourses and concepts.

The article by Petya Ilieva-Trichkova, Sarah Galloway, Bernhard Schmidt-Hertha, Shibao Guo, Anne Larson, and Vicky Duckworth provides a critical review of research into inequality and lifelong education from 1982 to 2020, drawing on the International Journal of Lifelong Education archives. They explore how the journal has engaged with the issue of inequality by systematically identifying relevant articles, and reviewing these – whilst taking account of the societal, cultural and political or economic contexts in which they were written. Most articles identified focused on specific disadvantaged groups, and discuss ways in which adult education might help, support and strengthen them. Some (a minority) took a more critical approach, assessing the drivers for inequality, or problematising the role of lifelong education as a catalyst for addressing inequality or social injustice. The analysis finds several themes emerging from their initial sweep of the archives: inequalities related to class, gender and migration/ ethnicity. However, these are represented unequally, and receive differential attention across the decades. Perhaps surprisingly, given the different forms of inequality addressed in the journal, they found very few papers that could be directly associated with historical events and contexts relevant to the times in which they were written; and – with notable exceptions – theoretically-driven conceptualisations of inequality were rare.

Pepka Boyadjieva and Kevin Orr provide fascinating insights into how authors in the journal have considered what lifelong learning implies for the nature of the university. ‘University as a cathedral: lifelong learning and the role of the university in the European context’ focuses on how lifelong learning has created opportunities and tensions in universities’ institutional environment. Based on a thematic review of articles in the journal over 40 years, the paper argues that implementing lifelong learning requires a profound change in the systemic characteristics of the university institution and cannot be limited to the establishment of departments of adult and continuing education. It suggests that lifelong learning may be a strategy that can help universities address some of the main problems they face, and to continue to develop as key institutions in the 21^st century society. Finally, they argue that the cathedral provides an institutional model that can simultaneously embody both a paradigm for lifelong learning and the possibility of preserving the specificity of university as an institution.

Finally, in ‘Inclusion and exclusion in later life learning’, Bernhard Schmidt-Hertha, Brian Findsen and Li Zhen explore how the concept and practices associated with learning in later life have developed since the 1980s. They trace how this area of research has evolved internationally, and illustrate their investigation with different approaches, particularly empirical studies, that have appeared in the International Journal of Lifelong Education. In doing so, they deepen the analysis of different aspects of inclusion and exclusion that characterise older adults (both generally, and for specific groups and sub-groups), whether this is in relation to work, or relates to digitalisation or health issues; and they call for attention to be given in future research to the issue of exclusion of older adults from the benefits offered by education.

The special issue concludes with two generous and thought-provoking review essays devoted to how influential thinkers of the field of lifelong education have been taken up in articles over the forty years of the journal. Carlos Torres and Yan Li consider Paolo Freire, while Chad Hoggan and Tetyana Hoggan-Kloubert focus on Jack Mezirow. Torres and Li demonstrate the enduring power of Freire’s ideas in stimulating reflection and argument on the changing and deepening challenges facing adult learners. Hoggan and Hoggan-Kloubert reveal a complex picture of efforts to come to terms with the impact of Mezirow’s concept of transformation as it relates to adults and learning. The essays remind us both of the intellectual scale of debates held in the pages of the journal over forty years and of our continuing responsibility to sustain such critical exchange. Torres and Li conclude that the International Journal of Lifelong Education (among others) ‘could, and should, lead the way to inspire democratic renewal via public intellectuals, social movements, and resilient communities struggling for a better future’.

Continuing to question

The International Journal of Lifelong Education remains committed to encouraging scholarship and debate in adult lifelong learning, and we have no difficulty in subscribing to Torres’ and Li’s call – or at least, of aiming to do so. We should, however, also recognise that aims are seldom fully realised. The journal inhabits a territory – perhaps a ‘field’ – which lies at the intersection of social theory, history, and educational practice. It shares this territory with communities (more and less resilient) social movements, academic institutions, governments, capitalist businesses, philanthropists, international organisations, and a host of others. In other words, journals, like individuals, must ‘make our way through the world’ (Archer, 2007).

Let us take an example. Reflecting in the interview already quoted on the editors’ original aims for the journal, Teddy Thomas mentioned bringing ‘people from all over the world’ together, with ‘the common interest in developing ideas and theories’ in adult and lifelong education; he thought in this it had been ‘very successful’. A quarter century after Teddy’s retirement, we maintain this aim. We are, however, also able to subject our success to more rigorous evaluation. A few years ago, we were pleased to learn that we had a ‘stronger international focus’ when compared with two other leading journals in the field (Fejes & Nylander, 2014, p. 230), and more recently that we were considered a ‘strategic’ location for presenting an overview of an adult education theory developed within the US to an international audience (Fejes & Nylander, 2015, p. 120); more recent analysis, however, poses questions. Early focus on ‘learning processes in former colonies and the Global South’ and ‘the first few numbers of IJLE’ evinced ‘a strong ambition to transgress the established national, linguistic and institutional ramifications of educational research in various ways’. But while former colonies and the Global South have remained ‘a subtheme … international commitment has proven hard to materialise and the preponderance of authors of Anglophone origins and from the Global North has remained stark’ (Nylander et al., 2022, p. 28). Our international commitment remains; over the years, we have taken steps – not least, appointing editors from a broader range of countries – to strengthen it. Yet our internationalism remains inevitably qualified: we continue, for instance, to be an English-language journal, with all that implies; and our content reflects, in various ways, the inequalities of the global scientific and educational establishment.

In presenting his famous report, Learning to Be, Edgar Faure set out four ‘basic assumptions’. One stands out: ‘belief in democracy’, implying everyone’s right to achieve their own potential and share in building their own future. Education ‘accessible to all’ was the keystone to this: but this must be ‘education whose aims and methods have been thought out afresh’ (Faure et al., 1972, p. vi). Similar words had been used half a century earlier by A.L. Smith, chair of Britain’s Ministry of Reconstruction Adult Education Committee. Adult education, he wrote, ‘is an inseparable aspect of citizenship, and therefore should be both universal and lifelong’; ‘the goal of all education must be citizenship’; the ‘essence of democracy’ is ‘not passive but active participation by all in citizenship’; ‘intelligent public opinion’ requires ‘a long, thorough, universal process of education continued into and throughout the life of the adult’ (Ministry of Reconstruction Adult Education Committee, 1919, pp. 4–5). A similar commitment to adult education as essential for citizenship and democracy remain central to this journal’s sense of purpose.

This commitment is unambiguous; yet it is also nuanced. Our purpose involves continual questioning: we prefer critique to celebration, analysis to applause. We impose no limit on critique, beyond that it is fair and reasoned. Of course, ‘making our way through the world’, for a journal such as ours, involves reconciling adaptability with authenticity, the need to survive – in an environment we may question, challenge, and even detest – with adherence to a core purpose and ideals. Unless we can adapt to changing circumstance, we cannot survive, let alone succeed. Without wholehearted commitment to purpose and ideals – to the strengthening of lifelong education as democratic practice, to social justice, to internationalism, to good and fair (if often impassioned) scholarship – survival would hardly constitute success.

Appendix

The editors and review editors are listed below, with the dates and issues of the journal from which their responsibilities took effect.

Vol 1 (No 1) 1982: Editors: Peter Jarvis & J.E. (Teddy) Thomas; Review Editor: E.O. Cunningham.

Vol. 2 (No. 1) 1983: Editors: Peter Jarvis & J.E. (Teddy) Thomas; Review Editor: John H. Davies.

Vol 18 (No 1) 1999: Editors: Peter Jarvis & Stella Parker; Review Editor: John Holford.

Vol 23 (No. 4) 2004: Editors: Peter Jarvis, Stella Parker & John Holford; Review Editor: Rachel Brooks.

Vol. 25 (No. 2) 2006: Editors: Peter Jarvis & John Holford; Review Editor: Rachel Brooks.

Vol. 27 (No. 5) 2008 Editors: Peter Jarvis & John Holford; Review Editor: Richard Waller.

Vol. 28 (No. 1) 2009: Editors: Peter Jarvis, John Holford & Rachel Brooks; Review Editor: Richard Waller.

Vol. 29 (No. 6) 2009: Editors: Peter Jarvis, John Holford, Rachel Brooks & Patricia Gouthro; Review Editor: Richard Waller.

Vol. 30 (No. 1): Editors: Peter Jarvis, John Holford & Patricia Gouthro; Review Editor: Richard Waller.

Vol 31 (No 5) 2012: Editors: Peter Jarvis, John Holford, Marcella Milana & Susan Webb; Review Editor: Richard Waller.

Vol 35 (No 1) 2016: Editors: John Holford, Marcella Milana, Richard Waller & Susan Webb; Review Editor: Steven Hodge.

Vol 41 (No 3) 2022: Editors: Marcella Milana (Editor in Chief), Steven Hodge, Richard Waller & Susan Webb; Review Editor: Elizabeth Knight.

Vol 42 (No 1) 2023: Editors: Marcella Milana (Editor in Chief), Ulrik Brandi, Steven Hodge, Tetyana Hoggan-Kloubert; Review Editor: Elizabeth Knight.