Changing Ideas and Beliefs in Lifelong Learning?

The title is deliberately ambiguous. The argument will consider what currently counts as lifelong learning in the context of changing political and educational trends in advanced capitalist societies and why it is necessary to interrogate and challenge particular interpretations that are currently dominant and fashionable.

By the turn of the twenty-first century it was being recognised that global networks and social movements were gathering widespread public involvement. Reflecting on its Millennium Campaign on Third World Debt, Jubilee 2000 argued that ‘the world will never be the same again’ as a result of huge numbers of people from civil society movements in both North and South mobilising to challenge the negative effects of globalisation, through citizen action, in solidarity beyond the nation state, to transform global agendas (Jubilee 2000). Through non-governmental organisations (NGOs), community based organisations (CBOs), social movements, issue campaigns and policy advocacy, citizens are finding ways to have their voices heard and to influence the decisions and practices of larger institutions that affect their lives - both locally and globally.

The rediscovery of the democratic significance of civil society is to be found in the rhetoric of government policy making - in the language of active citizenship, community participation and empowerment. But the issues involved are both complex and contested. As capital has gone global it has served to undermine the sovereignty of the nation state whilst putting pressure on rich and poor countries alike to maximise profit and cut back on public expenditure. The same processes are at work that talk of modernisation in the welfare states of the rich world and structural adjustment programmes in the poor world - the costs of which, in both contexts, are most likely to be borne by those who can afford them least. Questions and legitimate grievances abound but answers and solutions are in short supply. Social movements may pursue regressive as well as progressive goals, just as they may lead to the incorporation of dissent by the state rather than the challenging of inequality and social injustice.

What part does lifelong learning play in these developments? The roots of radical adult education lie in the real interests and struggles of ordinary people, in education that is overtly political and critical of the status quo and which is committed to progressive social and political change. But increasingly the role of education, particularly adult education and lifelong learning, is seen as preparing flexible workers for risk and uncertainty. Competitive advantage in the global economy apparently requires skills and training rather than curiosity, creativity and critical thinking. As collective welfare structures are being dismantled the provision of lifelong learning becomes the means by which the behaviour of individuals is modified for the brave new world of responsible and entrepreneurial citizenship. The onus is firmly on the individual to take individual responsibility for self improvement in economic and social circumstances within which individuals actually have little control. The structural distance between those who thrive and those who merely survive or go to the wall is greater now than when the present government came to power.

At a time when a quarter of a million ordinary members of civil society marched around Edinburgh to Make Poverty History in the run up to the G8 summit, and the consequence of terrorist suicide bombers in London now threatens to destroy the uneasy settlement that characterises race relations in Britain, the dominant discourse in adult learning appears disengaged from social and political action. And yet the ideas and beliefs which interpret the world and inform the provision of lifelong learning are supremely political in their purpose. The debate is preoccupied with fetishised frameworks for quality and accreditation, instrumentalism in relation to skills, the creation and measurement of individualised notions of achievement and a sickly rhetoric about confidence and self esteem that represents adult education as a form of therapy concerned with self improvement. In this context lifelong learning for the poor has everywhere become a condition of Benefit, employment or citizenship, designed to keep people busy.

The latest NIACE survey of participation in adult learning (Aldrige and Tuckett 2005) reveals that fewer people are currently engaged in learning than when the present Labour Government came to power in 1997. However prescriptive and instrumental the learning agenda has become, we can draw some comfort from the fact that its actual grip on most people’s lived reality is minimal. In this kind of policy climate, with this kind of professional compliance, the sort of adult education that once called itself a movement, that in the words of Raymond Williams should be a resource to ordinary people for a journey of hope, has been cut off from its roots.

When the current state of lifelong learning gets written about by future historians it will no doubt illustrate at least two well known clichés of the age to do with rearranging deckchairs and fiddling whilst Rome burns.