UNESCO's Utopia of Lifelong Learning

An Intellectual History

Maren Elfert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315278117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

With a focus on lifelong learning, this book examines the shifts that UNESCO's educational concepts have undergone in reaction to historical pressures and dilemmas since the founding of the organization in 1945. The tensions between UNESCO's humanistic worldview and the pressures placed on the organization have forced UNESCO to depart from its utopian vision of lifelong learning, while still claiming continuity. Elfert interprets the history of lifelong learning in UNESCO as part of a much bigger story of a struggle of ideologies between a humanistic-emancipatory and an economistic-technocratic worldview. With a close study of UNESCO's two education flagship reports, the Faure and Delors reports, Elfert sheds light on the global impact of UNESCO's professed humanistic goals and its shifting influence on lifelong learning around the world.

1 Introduction

“UNESCO is an organization concerned with man and his destiny.”

(RenéMaheu, 1965)¹

This book traces how an international organization, the United Nations Scientific, Educational and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), has shaped an educational idea, lifelong learning, in the context of global politics. It sheds light on the historical context in which the idea of lifelong learning emerged and the humanist ideology of the central figures who have defined it. It is a study about utopias, ideas and institutions to which great hopes were attached in the post-World War II decades that remained unfulfilled. I will argue that the concept of lifelong learning, as conceived by UNESCO, derived from the view of education as a human right. As one of my interviewees, Ravindra Dave, put it, “it’s a dream. It’s a dream of the whole humanity” (Interview with Ravindra Dave). This human rights-based approach has very little to do with the lifelong learning paradigm that we find in educational policies today.

Lifelong learning is undoubtedly a global educational paradigm. As John Field (2000) remarked, it is a “beautifully simple idea” (p. vii), and an idea that has been claimed by many cultures.² There are hardly any educational policies and strategies, be it at the global, national, regional or local level, that do not refer in one way or the other to the principle of lifelong learning (see Commission of the European Communities, 2000, for an example of a regional strategy; Lee, 2010, for the national level; City of Vancouver, 2008, for the local level; Jakobi, 2009, for a global overview). But what does the concept stand for? For Paul Lengrand (1986), the earliest theorist of lifelong learning (at the time still “lifelong education”) in UNESCO, the concept marked the “first time [when] an element of freedom has been introduced into the educational universe” (p. 9). For the UNESCO pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s, lifelong learning represented a humanistic and emancipatory approach that aimed at bringing out the full potential of human beings and enabling them to shape their societies towards greater democratization and social justice. Some contemporary scholars hold a very different view of lifelong learning. Bagnall (2000), in his analysis of the contemporary lifelong learning discourse, came to the conclusion that it was predominantly driven by economic determinism. According to Mojab (2006), “lifelong learning is the educational response to the new market order” (p. 353). In his study of the competing views of lifelong learning between UNESCO and OECD, Rubenson (2006) invoked the image of the Janus face, showing us its economistic side more often than its humanistic side. The point of departure of this book is the contradiction between the use of lifelong learning in neoliberal employability policies today and the humanistic vision of lifelong learning that grew out of the post-World War II debates about the new world order and prevailed especially in the UNESCO context in the 1960s and 1970s, with a revival period during the 1990s.

Why has the meaning of lifelong learning changed so radically over the past decades, from being “an element of freedom” to “the educational response to the new market order”? This book will offer an answer to this question by tracing the history of what some have called the “utopian” vision of lifelong learning in UNESCO. It is fair to say that UNESCO represents the international organization that, since its inception in 1945, has made the most important philosophical and theoretical contributions to the concept. But it is important to note that in parallel to UNESCO’s intense engagement with lifelong learning, especially during the 1970s and the 1990s, the idea was much discussed in educational circles more broadly, and other international organizations played an important part in bringing it to prominence under different names with slightly different meanings, such as the OECD’s recurrent education (Kallen, 1979). This study will focus on UNESCO’s view of lifelong learning, which shone a spotlight on the humanistic side of its Janus face. I argue that lifelong learning represents an expression of the humanistic ontology that UNESCO has constructed through the involvement of individuals who—while coming from different backgrounds and cultures—shared a certain humanistic ethos, which I will further define later in this book. The humanistic worldview provides a sense of continuity and identity to the organization in a constantly changing environment. Focusing on the concept of lifelong learning as a case in point, I will show how this idea has emerged, and how it has been kept alive while being impacted by internal, external, local and international influences in the context of global politics. In particular, in the last 25 years the pressure placed on UNESCO’s humanistic tradition by competing educational concepts has increased. As a consequence, UNESCO became implicated in developments which entailed a quite radical departure from its humanistic interpretation of lifelong learning, while still maintaining a claim of continuity.

This book represents a contribution to the discussion about the “world-wide crisis in education” (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 2) in terms of education’s increasing subjugation to profit considerations and the principle of the “market.” By focusing on the role an international organization, UNESCO, has played in shaping the humanistic educational paradigm of lifelong learning, I show how some governments and competing organizations have continuously pushed back UNESCO’s influence in favour of a more technical and economistic approach to education. The book offers a substantial study of UNESCO’s role in the post-World War II debates on human rights, with a particular focus on the right to education, and the two flagship education reports UNESCO published, Learning to Be (1972, aka the Faure Report) and Learning: The Treasure Within (1996, aka the Delors Report), which belong to the foundational literature on lifelong learning. It not only contributes to the history of the concept of lifelong learning, but, more broadly, it advances our understanding of the tensions and shifts in multilateral governance in education over the past 70 years.

Rationale Behind the Book

During my time as a member of the professional staff of the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL), I became increasingly troubled by the gap between UNESCO’s humanistic discourse and the reality of “results-based management.” I had the privilege of being involved in the conceptualization and development of a family literacy pilot project in Hamburg, in which UIL collaborated with Hamburg’s teacher training institute, which is a part of Hamburg’s education authorities.³ Especially in the first years, my counterpart in the teacher training institute and I struggled to secure funding for the family literacy project, and we had many discussions about the difficulty of convincing funders to invest in a project that showed no immediate results or the results of which were difficult to measure and to pin down. We had many discussions about the instrumental approach favoured by funders in contrast to a hermeneutic approach that left room for open processes and followed the development of a project the way it unfolded. I realized that a project that involved so many people—parents, children, teachers, administrators and institutions—was like a living organism. It had a character and a certain dynamic. It could be given direction and framing, but it could unfold differently than originally planned. I have observed these processes also in a two-year European family literacy project which I coordinated. One of the partners was a Turkish organization running various literacy and family literacy programs.⁴ Over the years that I followed their work, I noticed that one of their key programs, which had started off as a program to enhance the reading and writing skills of children, was later identified as an empowerment program for women, as they had come to realize that the program had its strongest effect on the children’s mothers. The funding schemes prescribed by the donor agencies with which UNESCO works, such as the World Bank, don’t allow for this kind of openness. Most funding agencies want to see immediate and measurable results for projects that have very specific goals, such as the increase in literacy levels, possibly already after the first year. Results-based educational planning treats human beings as means rather than ends in the teaching and learning process. I always felt that this approach contradicted the humanism and the concept of education as a human right that UNESCO propagates.

Many times—in the interviews I conducted for this book, at conferences and in discussions—I heard the argument that the dichotomy between the instrumental perspective of education and the human rights perspective is pointless or even detrimental to debates on education (Burnett, 2017, para. 2). Some of my interviewees pointed out that initially, the human rights approach and the “human capital” approach to education, which became influential in the early 1960s, complemented each other, an argument put forward also by Kjell Rubenson in some of his writings (e.g. Rubenson, 2015, p. 183). I acknowledge that there are many reasons for governments to provide education and for individuals to pursue it, and most people, from literacy learners to graduate students, regard education as an investment. But there is a fundamental difference between the instrumental perspective and the humanistic approach that I will explore in this book. For the founders of UNESCO, such as the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, and for others who occupy a central role in this study, such as Jacques Delors, the purpose of education consisted in the development of the human person—“making man truly human” (Maritain, 1943, p. 113). In the instrumental perspective, the purpose of education is to convey skills that are “useful” for some other purpose, changing “the means into ends” (p. 114). These two perspectives are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they represent divergent ontologies, which will be examined in this study. UNESCO’s view of education, which is influenced by Enlightenment thinking, emphasizes the “intrinsic” value of education. In marked contrast to critiques of the Enlightenment, such as Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1973) Dialectic of Enlightenment, Zeev Sternhell (1996) fervently argues that turning away from the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the value of the individual and the key idea of modernity that “men are able, in a rational manner, to create a better future” (p. 13) leads to antidemocratic, fascist and totalitarian tendencies. Sternhell’s (2010) research on the origins of fascism comes to the conclusion that we must emphasize what unites human beings, and not what differentiates them, such as religion, nationalism, language, ethnicity and cultural identity. This unifying view prevailed in the post-World War II debates carried out in UNESCO, as I will show in chapter one. Sternhell seems to be speaking out of Maritain’s statement that “the preface to fascism and Nazism is a thorough disregard of the spiritual dignity of man” (1943, p. 114). I argue that the Enlightenment concept of dignity constitutes one of the pillars of UNESCO’s humanism, which remains consistent even under the influence of the anti-humanist stance of the French 1968 “revolution.” Sternhell has been criticized for simplifying things, because he presents the story of modernity as basically an ideological struggle between two different camps—the proponents of the “Franco-Kantian Enlightenment” on the one hand, and the “communitarians,” the representatives of identity politics, on the other. I do not always agree with some of his conclusions, but his work greatly advanced my understanding of the influence of the Enlightenment on UNESCO’s humanism, which is underpinned by the belief in the possibility of peace and progress under the condition that human beings follow their capacity for rational agency.

The UNESCO ontology is reflected in the emblem of the organization, the Parthenon temple, a nod to the Greek credentials of humanism (Singh, 2011, p. 36; UNESCO, n.d.a, p. 2), which symbolizes an attachment to a Western worldview. Drawing on Gadamer (1975/2013), I refer to this humanism as a “tradition” in UNESCO. The humanistic ontology is a continuity in UNESCO, but at the same time UNESCO’s educational concepts and programs have undergone shifts as that tradition was continually renegotiated and reclaimed in the changing context of global politics and the political economy in which the organization operated. Each chapter of this book will focus on a specific period that held significance in terms of the (re-)emergence of UNESCO’s key educational concepts, from the foundational years to the present time. Each period is characterized by a different political, social and economic context, in which the tradition of UNESCO’s humanism has been (re)formulated by a variety of actors who were driven by motivations related to their biographies, beliefs and experiences. The questions guiding this study are: How has the concept of lifelong learning grown out of UNESCO’s humanistic approach to education, and how has the concept developed between 1945 and the present time? How has lifelong learning been shaped by multiple actors situated in a plurality of contexts who entered into dialectical relationships with UNESCO to contribute to its articulation in the tension between UNESCO’s humanistic tradition and the wider social, intellectual and political developments?

Three years before the right to education was proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948, it was enshrined in UNESCO’s constitution in the formulation “education for all.” UNESCO’s first flagship program, “fundamental education,” was followed by an engagement with éducation permanente (lifelong education), which later developed into “lifelong learning,” and which arguably constitutes UNESCO’s most successful educational paradigm. Since 1990 the Education for All (EFA) initiative, in 2015 “rebranded” as the Education 2030 agenda, has dominated UNESCO’s work, leading to a narrowing of the lifelong learning approach. The intellectual history of lifelong learning in UNESCO reflects shifting social and economic discourses and ideological tensions that have shaped debates about education around the world. One important ideological tension that runs like a thread through this book is the tension between the humanistic approach to education on the one hand and the economic-utilitarian view of education on the other. This tension comes out strongly in contemporary debates about education, marked by concerns about an overly instrumental approach to education and its increasing marketization and privatization (Marginson, 1997; Verger, Fontdevila, & Zancajo, 2016).

Definition of Key Concepts

When tracing the shifting meanings of “lifelong learning” against the backdrop of changing social and political constellations, three concepts will constantly recur throughout this book in relation to the shifting global environment in which UNESCO operates: “global governance,” “globalization” and “neoliberalism.” In this section I will briefly define these concepts that are ubiquitous in the social sciences. The term “global governance,” which was first coined by the phrase “governance without government” (Rosenau & Czempiel, 1992), reflects the transformations of the dynamics of government and power in the international system, including the changing role of the state and the increasing heterogeneity of the actors that shape and finance education globally. In the course of the 70 years covered by this book, many agencies, frameworks, mechanisms and programs of global governance of education have emerged, such as the UN-wide Education for All (EFA) initiative, involving not only governments, but also a myriad of international and non-governmental organizations—and increasingly also corporations and philanthropic foundations. In this study, the main argument with regard to global governance will be related to UNESCO’s declining role in it in favour of other international organizations, in particular the World Bank. Global governance is linked to the concept of globalization that I use to capture transformatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 UNESCO’s Humanism: The Challenge of “Unity in Diversity”
• 3 UNESCO’s Early Years: Human Rights, High Hopes and Harsh Realities
• 4 Éducation Permanente and the “Crisis of Education”
• 5 Learning to Be: The Faure Report
• 6 The Delors Report and the 1990s
• 7 The Struggle of Ideologies
• Index