Foucault and Lifelong Learning

Governing the Subject

Andreas Fejes, Katherine Nicoll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134097128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Over the last twenty years there has been increasing interest in the work of Michel Foucault in the social sciences and in particular with relation to education. This, the first book to draw on his work to consider lifelong learning, explores the significance of policies and practices of lifelong learning to the wider societies of which they are a part.

With a breadth of international contributors and sites of analysis, this book offers insights into such questions as:

• What are the effects of lifelong learning policies within socio-political systems of governance?
• What does lifelong learning do to our understanding of ourselves as citizens?
• How does lifelong learning act in the regulation and re-ordering of what people do?

The book suggests that understanding of lifelong learning as contributory to the knowledge economy, globalisation or the new work order may need to be revised if we are to understand its impact more fully. It therefore makes a significant contribution to the study of lifelong learning.

Chapter 1
Mobilizing Foucault in studies of lifelong learning

Katherine Nicoll and Andreas Fejes

Lifelong learning is an important contemporary theme within many countries and international organizations, in particular within the European Union and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It is promoted through national and international policies as a solution to the particular challenges of the contemporary age that must be overcome. It is used as a means to promote change and in this it promotes further change, within socio-political systems of governance, institutions for education and training and in our very understanding as citizens within society. Lifelong learning is therefore a significant phenomenon of our times and one that warrants close scrutiny. This book thus takes up questions of lifelong learning and the significance of such change. Drawing upon the work of Foucault it is possible to address such issues, in particular examining lifelong learning as part of the practices of governing in the twenty-first century, exploring the techniques through which such governing takes place and the subjectivities brought forth.

In this chapter, we outline how the work of Michel Foucault can be useful in the analysis of lifelong learning. We argue that he provides valuable tools that help us to understand our contemporary world and its discourses of lifelong learning in ways that are quite different from any other kind of analysis. These are helpful in promoting a critical attitude towards our present time and to the truths promoted today through and around lifelong learning. They show us how there has been and will always be other truths and ways of acting upon others and ourselves, thus pointing to the possibility of other ways of governing and constructing subjectivities.

Lifelong learning

The specific focus on lifelong learning within this text is undoubtedly timely and important. Lifelong learning is promulgated within contemporary national and international policies as a truth, as a required response to an increasing pace of change, the economic and social pressures of globalization and uncertainty over the future. Policies argue that if economies are to remain competitive within global markets and societies continue to cohere, then lifelong learning as a capacity and practice of individuals, institutions and educational systems must be brought forth in the construction of learning societies. They suggest that if nations do not join the race for a learning society, then all may be lost. Lifelong learning is thus promoted as a powerful policy lever for change within contemporary societies, and as such it requires our serious contemplation.

Lifelong learning is not promoted everywhere. It does, however, emerge within contemporary policies of many post-industrial nations and intergovernmental agencies. For example, lifelong learning and the learning society are promoted within the UK (Kennedy 1997; NAGCELL 1997, 1999; NCIHE 1997; DfEE 1998, 1999; SE 2003; DfES 2006), in Australia (DEETYA 1998), in Sweden (Fejes 2006) in Germany and from the Dutch, Norwegian, Finnish and Irish governments (Field 2000). Lifelong learning has been taken up strongly within the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO 1996, 1997) and by the European Commission (1996, 2000). In the United States, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (1996, see Popkewitz this volume) promotes learning through life. There is a sense that lifelong learning is being promoted as ‘the’ solution within a new policy rationality of capitalism, whereby those who do not conform will be left out of the next phase. The question of who is included and excluded is therefore significant – for whosoever rejects this new rationality may potentially miss, as the policy narrative goes, the economic boat. Questions over what lifelong learning is and what it does, therefore become urgent. Together with this, as we will argue later on in this chapter, questions over the kinds of questions asked of lifelong learning are equally important.

Lifelong learning is not a uniform or unitary theme within policy. It has emerged at differing times and in different nations over the last years, with differing emphases. John Field (2000) traces how policies of lifelong education, rather than learning, for example, emerged within European policies during the 1960s and 1970s, and were taken up by intergovernmental agencies such as UNESCO and OECD. Lifelong education appeared again in 1993, within the European Commission in Jacques Delors’ White Paper on competitiveness and economic growth (European Commission 1993). It emerged as lifelong learning in 1996 within European and national policy vocabularies, after the European Commission declared that year as the European Year of Lifelong Learning.

Three orientations to lifelong learning within policy have been suggested by Kjell Rubenson (2004) over the period from the 1970s until now – humanist, strong economistic and soft economistic. During the 1970s, discussion on lifelong learning was humanist in orientation. In his reading of the Faure report, published by UNESCO in 1972, written by the International Commission on the Development of Education and entitled Learning to Be: The World of Education Today and Tomorrow, Biesta (2006) sees this humanistic orientation as ‘remarkable’ for its vision of a generalized role for education in the world, for its reflection of the optimism of the 1960s and early 1970s in the possibility of generalized progress, and in its contrast with policies and practices of lifelong learning today. Edgar Faure at that time identified four assumptions underpinning the position of this report on education, ‘the existence of an international community’ with a: ‘fundamental solidarity’; a shared ‘belief in democracy’; the aim of development as the ‘complete fulfillment of man’ and that ‘only an over-all, lifelong education can produce the kind of complete man the need for whom is increasing with the continually more stringent constraints tearing the individual assunder’ (Faure et al., in Biesta, 2006:171, emphasis by Biesta).

During the 1980s and until the late 1990s this vision for lifelong learning was replaced by an orientation with a strong economic focus (Rubenson 2004). Highly developed human capital, and science and technology were identified as important means to increase productivity. Instead of humanistic ideas concerning equality and personal development, concepts such as evaluation, control and cost efficiency became important. A qualified workforce with the necessary skills and competences was central to arguments for lifelong learning. Over the last few years a third orientation to lifelong learning has emerged – a soft version of the ecomonistic paradigm. The economic perspective is still conspicuous, and the market has a central role, but civil society and the state have entered the arena to a higher degree within policy discourse. Here, the responsibility for lifelong learning is divided between the market, state and civil society, and the individuals’ responsibility for learning is the focus.

Rather than viewing these orientations as discrete or as distinct phases of policy interest in lifelong education and lifelong learning across time, Biesta (2006) argues for a multi-dimensional, triadic ‘nature’ of lifelong learning – with personal, democratic and economic functions. He suggests that for the authors of the Faure report an economic function of lifelong learning was in evidence, but was subordinated to a democratic and to a lesser extent a personal function. Thus, he proposes that there is a generalized polyvalence in and around economic, personal and democratic functions of lifelong learning within policy representations, and that this may help to contribute to its continued success as a policy theme and to its capacity for mobilization across social formations. More recently, however, for example, within the 1997 OECD report Lifelong Learning for All, the emphasis has been switched and the previously subordinated economic function has come to the fore and has taken on a different meaning in terms of value.

We can see that in more recent approaches the economic function of lifelong learning has taken central position, and we might even say that in the current scheme economic growth has become an intrinsic value: it is desired for its own sake, not in order to achieve something else. (The idea that economic development is an aim in itself is, of course, one of the defining characteristics of capitalism.)

(Biesta 2006:175, emphasis original)

Now, it appears that the economic function of lifelong learning is dominant within policy discourses and that this is increasingly promulgated as being of intrinsic value for societies. Personal and democratic functions are still there, but they take a subordinate role.

The analyses proposed by Rubenson and Biesta are created through different theoretical resources than those taken up within this book, but they point to important features of and distinctions between lifelong learning policy discourses during different periods of time. For us, the focus on the economic function of lifelong learning within contemporary discourses needs to be analysed as produced within specific historical and discursive conditions – conditions which must be carefully made visible as a way to destabilize our ‘taken-for-granted’ notions of lifelong learning. Such analysis will point to the work of power and how it discursively shapes, fosters and governs specific subjectivities, an issue that we will return to later on in this chapter.

Why Foucault and lifelong learning?

But we are getting ahead of ourselves already. Why do we then think that it is helpful to use ideas from the work of Michel Foucault for studies of lifelong learning? To us, it is first a question of perspective. Foucault’s work offers us a quite different perspective through which to articulate what goes on through lifelong learning. It offers alternative ways to formulate the questions that we might ask and thus the answers that we might find. To explain this further we will need to talk a little more about this perspective and what it can offer.

The chapters within this book, you could say, in one or other way, although certainly in very different ways, explore questions of power. They explore how (the means by which) lifelong learning is promulgated as power within the contemporary period, and what happens in the modification and co-ordination of power relations through lifelong learning. We know that to explore lifelong learning in these terms may mean that we ultimately find that we must put aside previous assumptions that we know what it is we do when we engage with lifelong learning either as policy makers, researchers, teachers or learners, and this is what we want. Foucault points out to us that although people can be quite clear about what they are doing at a local level, what happens in terms of the wider consequences of these local actions is not coordinated: ‘People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does’ (Foucault, in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982:187). It is these wider means and effects of lifelong learning as it is embroiled with and intrinsic to relations of power that we are interested to explore.

Such an analysis puts a specific focus on relations of power, a power that is not acknowledged in the everyday policy making and practices of lifelong learning or often within research into it. By posing such questions we are able to show, for example, how the ambition to ‘be inclusive’ through lifelong learning has exclusionary practices as one of its effects. Now, we may have already known that practices of inclusion in school and further education colleges leads to exclusion, but lifelong learning may well exacerbate rather than ameliorate this situation as it becomes increasingly ‘necessary’ in all walks of life.

Lifelong learning is then, through a Foucauldian perspective, intrinsic to contemporary political technologies and strategies of power. However, to say this, it is not necessary to see these as emanating from any particular person, group or indeed strategist. Indeed, Foucault specifically encourages us to give up these ideas. People who are engaged in lifelong learning practices act knowingly and may have strategic purposes. However, it is possible that when those who are involved see the wider consequences of a multiplicity of actions that take place locally, they may also see that there are unintended consequences in what both they and others do. Actions may not ‘join up’ (to use a co...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Chapter 1 Mobilizing Foucault in studies of lifelong learning
• Section 1 Governing policy subjects
• Section 2 Governing pedagogical subjects
• Section 3 Governing subjects
• Index