Abstract
This chapter is designated, more or less, as a follow-up to my “Rejoinder” to three commentaries in a 2008 symposium on my book The Learning Society in a Postmodern World published in 2004.
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Notes
- 1.
See Wain Kenneth (2008) ‘Rejoinder to Responses to an invitation to comment on the book: Wain, K, The Learning Society in a Postmodern World, by David Aspin, Padraig Hogan and Richard Bagnall’, in Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 40, Issue 4, August, pp. 557–581.
- 2.
A good definition of the maximalist conception of the learning society is the following: The learning society is one that is exceedingly self-conscious about education in its total sense; that is, conscious of the educational relevance and potential of its own institutions and of the general social environment that is its way of life, and is determined to maximize its resources in these respects, to the maximum. (Wain 1987, pp. 202–203).
- 3.
Reading Rorty’s and Gadamer’s politics of conversation, I was able to describe the learning society as an ongoing project created through the open-ended conversation of all the partners and stakeholders; educators (in the broadest sense), learners, policy makers, providers, and so on, more or less, also, in Dewey’s fashion.
- 4.
In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault describes “the proper task of a history of thought, as against a history of behaviors or representations,” as being “to define the conditions in which human beings ‘problematize’ what they are, what they do, and the world in which they live” (p. 10). The question he tried to respond to in the book was “how, why, and in what form was sexuality constituted as a moral domain” (p. 10).
- 5.
See especially Achieving our Country (1998).
- 6.
The relevance of my reference to the “European project” will appear clearer subsequently when I refer to and discuss the evolution of the lifelong learning discourse within the European Union.
- 7.
The proceedings of the conference were later published as Lifelong Education and Participation (Kenneth Wain editor) in 1985.
- 8.
I used Paterson’s book more extensively than in Philosophy of Lifelong Education, in an article published later (1992) “Making a Case for Adult Educational Rights.”
- 9.
For an extended discussion of the relation between lifelong learning and philosophy the reader is referred to my article “Lifelong Learning and Philosophy” (2009).
- 10.
In The Learning Society in a Postmodern World (2004) for instance.
- 11.
See my article “Lifelong Education: A Deweyan Challenge” (1984).
- 12.
References
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Wain, K. (2012). Coming to Terms with the Learning Society: Between Autobiography and Politics. In: Aspin, D., Chapman, J., Evans, K., Bagnall, R. (eds) Second International Handbook of Lifelong Learning. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2360-3_16
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