The Routledge International Handbook of Lifelong Learning

Peter Jarvis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135202521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

As lifelong learning grows in popularity, few comprehensive pictures of the phenomenon have emerged. The Routledge International Handbook of Lifelong Learning provides a disciplined and complete overview of lifelong learning internationally.

The theoretical structure puts the learner at the centre and the book emanates from there, pointing to the social context beyond the learner.
Up-to-the-minute syntheses from many of the leading international experts in the field give vital snapshots of this rapidly evolving subject from wide-ranging perspectives including:

• learning throughout life
• sites of lifelong learning
• modes of learning
• policies
• social movements
• issues in lifelong learning
• geographical dimensions.

This authoritative volume, essential reading for academics in the field of Lifelong Learning, examines the complexities of the subject within a systematic global framework and places it in its socio-historic context.

Part 1
Setting the scene

1
Lifelong learning

A social ambiguity

Peter Jarvis

This book is about lifelong learning: every chapter analyses it from a different perspective and this opening chapter raises some of the issues that surround the concept. It does not seek to provide answers, only to set the scene for some of the ensuing discussions.

Lifelong learning is now a common, taken-for-granted concept in the educational and business worlds: it is a term whose meaning has just been assumed but rarely questioned. On the surface its meaning seems self-evident—learning from ‘cradle to grave’—but beyond that self-evidency there are a number of issues lurking that suggest that the concept and the implementation of lifelong learning are much more problematic. I have called lifelong learning ambiguous for a number of reasons; for example, it is not a single phenomenon—it is both individual and institutional; it appears to be both a social movement and a commodity; it carries value connotations that are sometimes misleading; in one form it is a Western idea that we have tried to universalise in the light of globalisation; it is both a policy and a practice; it might be a gloss on social change or something more permanent. Naturally, in this chapter it is impossible to explore all of these ideas in depth, although I want to open up the discussion about some of them here.

Individual and institutional

Field and Leicester (2000: xvi–xix) pose this issue quite nicely when they ask the question about whether we are dealing with the question of lifelong learning or permanent schooling. However, they do not go on to develop the ambiguity that they focus upon in the title of their chapter. But, it is a question hidden from the debate by the traditional definition of the concept, such as the one given by the European Commission:

all learning activity undertaken throughout life, with the aim of improving knowledge, skills and competences within a personal, civic, social and/or employment-related perspective.

(EC, 2001:9)

This in an individualistic definition that is open to question on its instrumental perspective; it suggests that lifelong learning must have an aim. However, I have argued elsewhere (Jarvis, 2006) that learning is an existential phenomenon that is co-terminal with conscious living, that is, learning is lifelong because it occurs whenever we are conscious and it needs have no objective in itself, although it frequently does have a purpose. In a sense, lifelong learning is neither incidental to living nor instrumental in itself—it is an intrinsic part of the process of living that I have defined as:

The combination of processes throughout a life time whereby the whole person—body (genetic, physical and biological) and mind (knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, emotions, beliefs and senses)—experiences social situations, the perceived content of which is then transformed cognitively, emotively or practically (or through any combination) and integrated into the individual person’s biography resulting in a continually changing (or more experienced) person.

(Jarvis, 2006:134)

Since we all live within time in society, there are times when we can take our life-world for granted and act almost unthinkingly within it for so long as we respond to the familiar, but once we are confronted with novel situations we can no longer take that world for granted. It is in this state of disjuncture that we become conscious of the situation and are forced to think about it or adapt to it in some way—that is learning. Disjuncture, itself, is a complicated phenomenon, discussion about which lies beyond the scope of this chapter, but briefly it is the gap that occurs between our experience of a situation and our biography, which provides us with the knowledge and skill that enable us to act meaningfully. When this gap occurs, we are not able to cope with the experience and so we are forced to ask: What do I do now? What does this mean?, and so on. The ambiguity of disjuncture is that it is when we know that we do not know that we are in a position to start learning and, in order to cope with the disjunctural situation, we have to learn something new. Moreover, in a rapidly changing world we can take fewer things for granted and so disjuncture becomes a more common phenomenon; thus, throughout our life time, we are forced to keep on learning—lifelong learning—and it is only when we disengage from social living that the rate at which we learn may slow down.

Traditionally, learning has been regarded as the preserve of psychology, but it is a humanistic phenomenon and we have to recognise the wide range of academic disciplines that examine learning (Jarvis and Parker, 2005). But learning is both individualistic and lifelong, so it is an existential phenomenon: there is no way that it can be anything else since it is one of the driving forces of human living. But, when we read much of the literature on lifelong learning, we are certainly not confronted with an existential phenomenon but a social one, so that we have to recognise that the term is used in a totally different manner. This is the point implicit in Field’s and Leicester’s title—just how is it related to lifelong education, or even to education itself. While Field and Leicester recognise that lifelong learning transcends schooling, they do not discuss the idea that the term has come to imply attending formal learning sessions for a specific educational purpose, just as that contained in the EC’s definition. In this sense, the intermittent attendance at educational institutions throughout one’s life time—albeit in policy documents this usually means the duration of the work life until the most recent one (EC, 2006)—indicates that the term is used in a different manner to the learning process but that it also includes that process. In this sense, the non-existential approach to lifelong learning also embodies a form of recurrent education—a concept that was popular with the OECD and other institutions in the 1970s, but it also goes beyond it by including initial education. Lifelong learning, therefore, includes formal and non-formal, as well as informal, learning. In addition, senior citizens’ learning should be included, although it is frequently omitted in policy documents (but see EC, 2006). Consequently, in a recent book (Jarvis, 2007:99), I also regard lifelong learning as a social and institutional phenomenon:

Every opportunity made available by any social institution for, and every process by which, an individual can acquire knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, emotions, beliefs and senses within global society.

Both of the definitions refer to different approaches to lifelong learning. In this sense, the second definition might also be indicative of the so-called learning society, or the institutionalisation of the learning process. We are not faced with one term but two, not totally different, but overlapping phenomena—one human and individual and the other both individual and social—or at least institutional; one more likely to be studied by the philosopher and psychologist, although not entirely, as Jarvis and Parker (2005) show, and the other to be studied by both of these and also by the economist, the policy theorist and the sociologist. Certainly, the study of lifelong learning requires a multidisciplinary approach.

New social movement and commodity

In our contemporary society people are frequently urged to return to learning, to get qualifications, and so on. It has become a new social movement, and yet some of the institutions that are urging us to return to learning seem to have totally different motives—they are trying to sell their wares. In some ways this relates back to the two definitions that we have just discussed. It is the first way of viewing lifelong learning that lends itself to being regarded as a new social movement, while the second approach allows for it to be seen as a commodity.

A new social movement

The existential definition of lifelong learning is about the process of transforming experience into knowledge and skills, etc., resulting in a changed person—one who has grown and developed as a result of the learning. In this sense, learning is essential; indeed, just as food and water are essential to the growth and development of the body, learning is an essential ingredient to the growth and development of the human person—it is one of the driving forces of human becoming and enriches human living. In this sense, learning assumes value—it is something that is apparently self-evidently good, and something that human beings must engage in if they are going to grow and develop and, as a result, be useful members of society. Learning, then, is a valuable human process and, the more that we learn, the richer we will be as human beings, and the recognition of this has led to many campaigns to encourage learning. However, the main motivator of these campaigns has not always been a concern only to enrich the human person, so much as to ensure that society’s needs are met in this knowledge economy. Learning is necessary to ensure that individuals are employable and enable European societies to achieve the Lisbon goals of making Europe a global leader by 2010—something it now acknowledges it will not achieve. But some who have espoused this more humanistic and individualistic approach to learning have also embedded it in the social context, especially for those who are responsive to the EU’s aspirations embodied in the Lisbon Declaration. ‘Learning pays!’ claims Ball (1998). Here we see a pragmatic and instrumental approach to learning and the learning society—it pays to learn, but Ball actually produces no empirical evidence to support his claims, although there is clear evidence to show a correlation between the level of education and the amount of money earned.

But this rather evangelistic approach to lifelong learning, echoed by the writings of Longworth and Davies (1996), reflects more than an academic approach to analysing the process; it has become an ideology and a vision for the future. This same but more measured approach is to be found in Ranson (1994), where he maps out what a learning society should be like. There are also, in the UK, a variety of groups that fervently encourage learning, such as The Royal Society of Arts’ project on Learning, the British Institute of Learning, the European Lifelong Learning Institute, and so on, and their existence suggests that lifelong learning has become a new social movement. This is a different approach to that adopted by Crowther (2006), who asks how lifelong learning should be associated with social movements rather than seeing it as a social movement. We read the same enthusiasm for lifelong learning in the learning city network, which has its own aims, means of action and organisation (DfEE, 1998). In addition, there are frequent media advertisements to persuade people to return to learning and many slogans such as ‘Learning is Fun’ are publicised. New social movements differ from traditional social movements since they are not class-based interest groups agitating for political change. They tend to be broad movements seeking to change society through the political processes. Abercrombie et al. (2000) suggest that new social movements have four main features: aims, social base, means of action and organisation.

Aims

The aims of the lifelong learning movement are to create a culture of learning, or intended learning, as learning per se occurs naturally in the process of living, but intended learning is basically vocational, although in learning cities and regions there is a greater emphasis on the non-vocational than there is in learning organisations. The second purpose of learning cities and regions, according to the then Department for Education and Employment (DfEE, 1998) document, is ‘to support lifelong learning’ and ‘to promote social and economic regeneration’ (p.1) through partnerships, participation and performance.

Social base

Unlike traditional social movements, the social base of new social movements is not social class, but, in this case, appears to be professional educators, often from an adult education background, who have embraced lifelong learning, and the leadership can stem from one organisation—not necessarily an educational one. For instance, in Hull ‘City Vision Ltd is the public/private partnership charged with taking this ambition forward’ (DfEE, 1998:15).

Means of action

Those who propagate the ideas of learning cities do not now need action in the forms of social protest so much as lobbying those who are influential in their the various layers of society in which they function, through international and national conferences, publications and public lectures. In addition, we find that advertising and other ways of spreading the ‘good news’ of lifelong learning are also employed.

Organisation

Lifelong learning per se has a variety of organisations, as we have already noted, and, in addition, there are learning city partnerships of educational and other service providers, which includes business and industry. Each organisation acts as a coordinator, having its committee and, maybe, part-time or full-time staff.

Part of what these organisations are doing is trying to create a greater awareness of the advantages of learning and to get educational establishments to provide more opportunities for adults to learn, so that the social movement has social aims that, in an interesting manner, actually coincide with those of the educational organisations and the government. Consequently, one major difference between this new social movement and many other social movements is that it is pushing against an already opened door, whereas most traditional social movements seem to push against closed, and even locked, doors because they oppose the dominant sectors of society, as was the experience of m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Setting the scene
• Part 2: Learning throughout life
• Part 3: Sites of lifelong learning
• Part 4: Modes of learning
• Part 5: Policies
• Part 6: Social movements
• Part 7: Perspectives on lifelong learning
• Part 8: Geographical dimensions