Studies in the education of adults

As global economic and social crises deepened over the last decade, their acknowledgement has influenced adult education and lifelong learning policies by international organisations. The associations between international organisations, the making of adult education policy, and the ‘common good’ that frame this special issue were one of a few cross-cutting matters of concern, which emerged from insightful discussions held at the international conference: ‘Equity, Social Justice and Adult Education and Learning Policy’ (8–10 June 2017, Verona, Italy), organised by the Network on Policy Studies in Adult Education (operating within the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults, ESREA). Across a number of parallel and plenary sessions, conference participants explored and debated at length, how far adult education and learning policy support or hamper the conditions for a fair redistribution of resources and the full recognition of rights – given cultural, ethno-racial, linguistic, religious and sexual diversity in society.

A selection of contributions first presented at the Verona conference is brought together in this Special Issue.

Social and economic crises, and the EU

Social and economic crises are experienced collectively at both national and international levels, not least in those countries and world regions with growth models anchored in neoliberal principles (e.g. privatisation, free trade, deregulation and fiscal austerity). In Europe, state and regional responses to the last global financial crisis point to a renewed reliance on adult skills as the panacea. In the meantime, the exacerbation of religious conflicts, extremisms and warfare worldwide has pushed an ever-increasing number of citizens to escape poor economic conditions, political crisis and war to seek alternative life prospects in Europe and elsewhere. Under these circumstances, both research and public knowledge have highlighted the long-term evolution of inequalities, a concentration of wealth, the limits of social solidarity, and the fragility of social cohesion.

The contribution by Borut Mikulec that opens this collection pays attention to European Union’s policy and its contribution, over the period 2000–2016, to raise the political visibility of adult education and learning – at least within the European region. Through the lenses of political sociology, substantiated by documentary analysis, this work corroborates existing critiques of the European Union, and its policy, for their primarily economic, instrumental and vocational emphasis. Most importantly, however, Mikulec’s focus on, and concern with values, normative presumptions, and ideology also brings to the fore how adult education and learning is conceptualised as a form of ʻcrisis knowledgeʼ (Jarvis and Griffin 2003), or a remedy to educational, socioeconomic and political problems that Europe and its member states face. This, as the author contends, is in line with the ideology of modernity, yet applied to today’s late modern European societies. All of which points at the dominance of liberal over community-based values, but also at a profound re-signification of community-based values.

Adult education for more equitable and socially just societies

Recently, the international community of education and development has adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015, which includes seventeen Sustainable Development Goals on a set of topics ranging from the fight against poverty, and the eradication of hunger to the fight against climate change. Among them, objective four refers to ‘guaranteeing an inclusive, equitable and quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all’. In comparison with the Millennium Development Goal on education that preceded it, even if the fundamental principles on which it was founded remain valid, i.e. education is a fundamental right and a public good, the achievement of objective four is not limited to low-income or conflicting countries, but applies to all countries, regardless of their income or development levels. For this reason, the Mid-Term Review of the Sixth International Conference on Adult Learning and Education (CONFINTEA VI) held in October 2017 in Suwon (South Korea) debated what should be countries’ priorities, when considering the contribution that adult education and learning can make to the 2030 Agenda.

One contribution in this collection by Lisa Breyer enquiries how key concepts such as equity and social justice are negotiated within the context of adult education at the intersection between national and international levels. Breyer performs a lexicometric analysis that, borrowed from linguistic, is a novelty in adult education policy studies, of national monitoring reports produced by UNESCO member states. This with the scope of identifying country-based patterns of understandings of equity and social justice, and interrogate whether and how they connect to the international discourses on adult education and learning by UNESCO or the EU. Breyer’s methodological approach and her analytic insights on the concepts of equity and social justice may well exemplify those connections that educational researchers claims between agenda setting by the EU and other international organisations and national discursive policy interpretations. Perhaps not surprisingly, her analysis reveals different patterns of understandings when contrasting EU versus non-EU member states amongst UNESCO members. Notably, her results point at linguistic connections between participation and the acknowledgement of special target groups with issue of equity and social justice. Yet, in line with Mikulec’s analysis, only in EU country reports participation and target groups acknowledgement are more often linked to employment and the Labour market. Moreover, as Breyer stresses, only in EU country reports equity is also strongly associated with standardisation issues.

The common good and large-scale international assessments

In recent years, UNESCO suggested revisiting the purpose of education and the organisation of learning from a humanist perspective in Rethinking education: Towards a global common good? (UNESCO 2015). The document states that the principle of education as a public good is under tension due to the dramatic increase of non-state actors in education and therefore also to the risks related to its reification and commodification. Thus it suggests substituting the concept of public good, with that of ‘common good’, which refers to all those ‘goods that human beings share intrinsically in common and that communicate with each other, such as values, civic virtues and the sense of justice’ (Deneulin and Townsend 2007, p.142). Accordingly, common goods are those that are realised ‘in the reciprocal relations in which and by means of which human beings obtain their well-being’ (Cahill cited in: Deneulin and Townsend 2007, p.143). By extension, understanding education as a common good allows, according to the authors of Rethinking education, to overcome an instrumental conception of education, to recognise the diversity of interpretations that, in different contexts, cosmovisions and knowledge systems, define what constitutes a common good, and the participatory nature of the processes through which education is developed as common action (UNESCO 2015, p. 85–86).

Paralleling this process, with the aim of intervening on adult education and learning policy development at country level, we assist at a rapid expansion in the use of large-scale international assessment under the aegis of the OECD. Two contributions to this special issue focus on this expansion and interrogate their potential effects.

Mary Hamilton investigates the functioning of the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) as ‘an engine for change’, by application of a socio-material approach (Fenwick et al. 2011). Through an examination of OECD’s publicity materials and how media covered PIAAC survey in 2016 in four partaking countries (Singapore, Greece, New Zealand and Slovenia), Hamilton discusses the ways PIAAC’s findings are framed and interpreted in these countries’ public debates. On this ground, the author argues for the unpredictability of policy changes in the field of adult education and learning derived from PIAAC findings, as influenced by different interests and contextual factors. So, although contributing to national improvements in terms of equity and prosperity is among PIAAC explicit goals (OECD 2013), Hamilton notes that whether and how it actually contributes to such goals is not straightforward.

In a different contribution, Anke Grotlu¨schen focuses attention on another large-scale international assessment, the Programme for International Students Assessment, and the way Global Competence has being developed as a new assessment domain by the OECD. Using discourse analysis of discourse ‘fragments’ of different nature (e.g. working documents, webinar’s slides, brochures), the author examines how Global Competence was born and developed into a new competence domain, yet in so doing, she argues, voices and theories from the Global South disappeared, so did religious, emotional, bodily issues, in favours of a western understanding of Global Competence as a cognitive, rational and universal skill.

Political ‘utopia in everyday life’

In the light of these international policy developments it is of critical importance to question what models of equity and social justice are embedded in adult education and learning policy at international levels, in Europe and beyond, and challenge existing growth models so as to reconcile economic growth, equity and social justice. For this reason, it is also important to recognise the utopian nature of universal equity and social justice. All of which urges us to bring about a political ‘utopia in everyday life.’ This conception, introduced by the Italian-born adult educator Ettore Gelpi, suggests paying equal attention to all those utopias that contribute to altering orthodox socio-economic and power relations through the day-to-day activity of social actors, including policy researchers.

The last two contributions to this special issue advance alternatives to consider the position of lifelong learning principles in social investment policies, and of critical pedagogy in critical policy analysis.

The contribution by Ruggero Cefalo and Yuri Kazepov addresses the relationship between social investment and lifelong learning, two independent approaches from a social policy perspective. By contrast, the authors discuss how lifelong learning can be theoretically integrated within social investment approaches. They do so by bringing to light not only the differences in scope and aims of interventions but also the overlaps between these approaches to social policy. Hence they contrast narrower functionalistic perspectives and market-lead human capital views that permeate both approaches with more holistic views of inclusion, which acknowledge and value social participation and human capabilities. Against this backdrop, Cefalo and Kazepov argue for a potentially productive re-conceptualisation of social policies that acknowledges the time dimension, to foresee coherent interventions over the life course.

Finally, the contribution by Licínio C. Viana Silva Lima that closes this collection challenges primarily economic, instrumental and vocational emphases in adult education and learning policy. Drawing on the works of Paulo Freire and Ettore Gelpi, the author argues that welfare state intervention is among the source of an ‘education crisis’, which brings along adult education and training as a strategy for ‘crisis management’. In so doing, however, Lima calls for critical pedagogy and critical policy analysis of adult education and learning as a way to overcome the debacle, advocating for a look backwards (to the legacy of Freire and Gelpi) as a necessary way forward.

In spite of their different foci of attention and theoretical and methodological approaches, altogether the contributions to this special issue provide critical analysis of the underpinnings, representations and development models embedded in adult education and lifelong learning policies by international organisations (EU and the OECD particularly). At the same time, they offer critical reflections on rethinking adult education and lifelong learning as a ‘common good’ for more equitable and just societies, inspired, among others, by the political legacy of politically engaged educators of the past that were born in the South but gained a global reach (i.e. Pauro Freire, Ettore Gelpi).