Lifelong learning: Innovation, policy and institutions

Abstract

Extensive debates in academic and practitioner circles over the last two or three decades, on the expansion of a liberalized knowledge-based economy and the learning society conceived as its corollary, continue to raise many critical questions. Theorists and practitioners in fields of education and lifelong learning are brought prominently into these debates as lifelong learning is elevated, at least rhetorically, in policy discourse to a key role. The European Union has famously articulated its aspiration towards achieving competitive knowledge-based economic advantage in the global economy. Its Lisbon Agenda of 2000 was relaunched in 2005 and its current policy strategy, Europe 2020 (European Commission 2010), continues to reinforce the key economic objectives and strategies of the Lisbon framework. Lifelong learning is promoted as a vital route to aligning the learning society with the knowledge economy. Yet the conceptualization of the ‘learning society’ and of lifelong learning promoted in the knowledge-economy policy models leaves, to educationists, very much to be desired. Many educationists argue that a dominant policy model of the knowledge-based economy and learning society binds education and lifelong learning into the service of a commanding yet narrow economic agenda - an agenda that now extends in reach to encompass notions of citizenship and social cohesion. That economic policy pursuit, moreover, risks a further weakening of the social rudiments of cohesion and inclusion which are similarly much extolled in policy discourse.