The planetspeak discourse of lifelong learning in Sweden: what is an educable adult?

Abstract

This article focuses on the idea of the educable adult subject in Sweden and the ways this idea has re‐emerged in different practices during the twentieth century. It’s a policy analysis where official documents from the twentieth century and early twenty‐first century concerned with adult education in Sweden are analysed based on the Foucauldian notion of governmentality. The results show that the idea of the educable adult subject has been present during the major part of the twentieth century. But there are differences in how it is inscribed into the practices. The main difference is that the educable subject today is created in relation to a new rationality of governing where it is governed and constructed through its own choices and actions instead of through institutions based on knowledge produced by the social sciences and experts. Further, the ambition today is that everyone should be included in lifelong learning. At the same time, these ambitions also create exclusion. What happens to those who cannot or do not want to participate in lifelong learning? I argue that such practices of inclusion/exclusion are present in all the documents analysed, but that today, this practice has taken a specific shape.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Professor Staffan Larsson, PhD Ulf Olsson, Professor Thomas S. Popkewitz and the Thursday group seminar at the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin‐Madison, for comments on different drafts of this article.

Notes

1. Ministry of Education (1924, 1948, 1952, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004a, 2004b).