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This article was downloaded by: [University of Birmingham] On: 07 October 2014, At: 09:35 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccom20 Lifelong Learning: Ideas and achievements at the threshold of the twenty-first century Lalage Bown a a University of Glasgow , Scotland Published online: 01 Jul 2010. To cite this article: Lalage Bown (2000) Lifelong Learning: Ideas and achievements at the threshold of the twenty-first century, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 30:3, 341-351, DOI: 10.1080/713657473 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/713657473 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,

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Page 1: Lifelong Learning: Ideas and achievements at the threshold of the twenty-first century

This article was downloaded by: [University of Birmingham]On: 07 October 2014, At: 09:35Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T3JH, UK

Compare: A Journal ofComparative and InternationalEducationPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccom20

Lifelong Learning: Ideas andachievements at the thresholdof the twenty-first centuryLalage Bown aa University of Glasgow , ScotlandPublished online: 01 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Lalage Bown (2000) Lifelong Learning: Ideas and achievementsat the threshold of the twenty-first century, Compare: A Journal of Comparative andInternational Education, 30:3, 341-351, DOI: 10.1080/713657473

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/713657473

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of allthe information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on ourplatform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensorsmake no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views ofthe authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor andFrancis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private studypurposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,

Page 2: Lifelong Learning: Ideas and achievements at the threshold of the twenty-first century

reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any formto anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use canbe found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Compare, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2000

Lifelong Learning: ideas and achievements at the thresholdof the twenty-� rst century

LALAGE BOWN, University of Glasgow, Scotland

ABSTRACT Taking a historical perspective and focusing on Low and Medium HumanDevelopment countries, the paper starts with a quotation from a nineteenth-century Scotproposing universal empowerment through education for all citizens and ends with therecognition that at the end of the twentieth century his social justice challenge has notyet been met. The concept of lifelong learning and associated ideas are unpacked andparticular applications highlighted, including human rights, literacy and gender. Newarenas for lifelong learning are noted, but the general imbalance between the HighHuman Development countries and the rest of the world is under scored. At the sametime, lessons in learning from the majority world for the High Development countriesare suggested, including development-related learning and popular participation.

Introduction

This is a historian’s ‘take’ on the evolution of a concept through the twentieth century.It attempts to unpack the concept of lifelong learning and show it as more than a slogan,to indicate some of the areas within which it has been applied and to concentrate on itsapplication in the majority world of Middle and Low Human Development countries(rather than the countries of High HD which often dominate educational discussion).Within a very short paper, it is only possible to illustrate ideas and events by highlyselective example.

The View from 1900

A free life is the only life worthy of a human being. That which is not free isnot responsible, and that which is not responsible is not moral. …

Now, freedom, taken in its broadest sense, is conditioned by several things,such as health of body, wealth, and, above all, education. … it is clear enoughthat the uneducated man, however well endowed with health and wealth, is aslave. In the � rst place, he is a slave to other people’s opinions, as every onemust be who fails to think for himself. He who acts upon the thought ofanother is practically that other’s slave. This we see daily in the politicalworld, where the great body of the people, on account of their ignorance, are

ISSN 0305-7925 (print)/ISSN 1469-3623 (online)/00/030341-11Ó 2000 British Association for International and Comparative Education

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deprived of their rights and often of other things by sel� sh men who havereceived a good education. …

… the chief educational problem which the nineteenth century passes on to thetwentieth is, by what means shall every citizen in the nation receive such atraining for body and soul as shall enable him to enjoy all the treasures ofculture won by past generations, and to take part in all the activities of life withintelligence, energy and bene� cence? (Davidson, 1898, quoted in Grattan,1959)

Thomas Davidson, a Scottish emigrant to North America, said this in a lecture deliveredin New York in 1898, introducing his vision of a people’s university open to all and witha curriculum combining general scienti� c and cultural awareness with vocationaltraining. His language and some of his cultural assumptions may seem archaic to us, buthis challenge to twentieth century education was not. An education for every citizenmoves it beyond school to adult life and his rationale for such provision, starting fromfreedom and social justice, tunes in to the rationales of the twentieth century for lifelonglearning. His relation of education to power foreshadows a strong theme of twentiethcentury educational thinkers, particularly such writers as Freire (1972), Gramsci (1974)and Gelpi (1979), who all emphasised education for adult citizens. His suggestion ofhealth, wealth and education as the three conditions for freedom seems like apre� guration of UNDP theorisation in the 1990s of these conditions for human develop-ment.

Davidson is quoted because of his direct challenge to his twentieth century successorsand because of his prescience of some of the themes which successors took up. It needssaying at the outset that it is possible to trace lifelong learning ideas and practice muchfurther back in time and across other societies than the Euro-American. Such ideas havemade up an important constituent, for instance, in Islamic thought; ‘seeking afterknowledge’ is enjoined on all believers, and learning was not restricted to a particularage. For another example, in some African societies, there are institutionalised phases oflearning through life, with age-grade systems, culminating in the grade of elder. Manysuch concepts and practices were explored in the Faure Report, Learning to Be (Faure,1972).

Within the Euro-American cosmos, ideas of lifelong learning were implicit in Plato’sAcademy 2400 years ago (but restricted to a privileged elite). Forward in time, there wasa more democratic strain in the writings of some of the French revolutionaries in the1790s, for instance Condorcet, who believed that education “should aim to respond tothe needs of all ages”, that it “must be general and include all citizens” and that it should“insure that people at every stage of their life have the facilities to preserve and extendtheir own knowledge” (Condorcet, 1792).

There is an ancestry, therefore, for twentieth century innovations in lifelong learning.All the same, the twentieth century brought new themes into the discussions (such as therelation of learning to development), as well as new institutions designed to realise it insome locales. Moreover, as with all aspects of education, the second half of the twentiethcentury gave the opportunity, through UNESCO and other agencies, for broad inter-national exchanges and attempts at consensus on lifelong learning. UNESCO itselfadopted lifelong education as its ‘master concept’ for educational planning and lip-ser-vice continued in the 1990s. For example, the 1993 Delhi Declaration of the nine mostpopulous nations af� rmed a commitment “to meet the basic learning needs of all our

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Lifelong Learning 343

people by making primary education universal and expanding learning opportunities forchildren, youth and adults” (UNESCO, 1994).

Consensus or not, lifelong learning is far from a reality in any present-day nation, sothat if Thomas Davidson were to be standing on the threshold of the twenty-� rst century,he would probably produce a very similar challenge: by what means shall every citizenin the nation receive such a training for body and mind as to enable him or her to haveaccess to the knowledge won by past generations and to take part in all the activities ofpresent-day life with intelligence, energy and civic awareness?

This paper will look at the main ideas of the twentieth century relating to lifelonglearning, as well as some practical achievements, in order to � esh out that challenge.

Clarifying Ideas

We have already mentioned lifelong education and lifelong learning, learning at differentages and education for adults. Before going further, it is necessary to clarify these andone or two other concepts.

All human creatures, other than the most severely disabled, are of course learning allthe time. People learn from family, friends, casual contacts, social institutions of allkinds, natural events, as well as from the printed or electronically transmitted word. Theconcept of lifelong learning does not, however, characterise an inchoate mass of randomlearning; it implies learning to which a person has applied order and analysis, with orwithout the help of others. Because education involves the facilitation of learning, theterminology has often switched to lifelong education. In certain types of society,sometimes labelled ‘traditional’, lifelong education may be seen as almost co-terminouswith lifelong learning; but as soon as education takes place in separate institutions calledschools, it becomes less broad than learning. At the same time it provides (or shouldprovide) the tools to a learner to help her or him interpret and de� ne their learning, inschool and beyond. Learning and education also differ in that learning is the experienceof an individual, while education is a social activity—or as Cyril Houle put it, learningis an operative and education a cooperative art (Houle, 1972).

This may seem obvious, but there has very often been confusion caused when the twoexpressions are used as if interchangeable, as happened for a period in the 1960s and1970s, when there was an international impulse to use the word learning when educationwas meant, for the very understandable reason that thinkers and teachers wanted tounderline the centrality of the learner in any educational transaction. Capitalist andsocialist educationists converged in this impulse, the former because late and post-indus-trial capitalism requires constant re-skilling of the workforce and the latter because ofrights arguments (as discussed below).

In the twenty-� rst century, it will be important to stress that lifelong learning forindividuals (as individuals or as members of communities) requires more than theprovision of a formal structure of lifelong education, important though that would be. Afavouring environment for any individual’s own structured learning requires the oppor-tunities for varying kinds of formal education, but also the means of learning in lessformal ways.

There was a period in the 1970s and 1980s when the term recurrent education becamepopular (especially in Europe and in the OECD), to express the idea of learners movingin and out of education during their lives. This was a handy description and conveyedthe idea that educational opportunities should be open to people at different stages.Educators interpreted it as favouring individual learning in the spaces between education

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episodes. Unfortunately, it became used in a restrictive sense, with education beingclosely related to economic goals and thus not seen as available to people past workingage or for broader social purposes. It has therefore perhaps lost its usefulness; butlifelong learning will certainly require the support of episodes of formal education in thefuture.

It is not possible to leave de� nition without looking at one other concept: adulteducation. Because most people spend more of their lives as adults than as children, anymodel of education which does not see schooling as simply a front-end preparation forlife and work has to expect a component of education at a later stage of a learner’s life.A half-century ago this point was made by a British scholar, Richard Livingstone:

We behave like people who should try to give their children in a week all thefood they require for a year: a method which might seem to save time andtrouble, but would not improve digestion, ef� ciency or health. (Livingstone,1949)

He also makes a further observation about the awkwardness of always delinkingstructured learning from action:

Youth studies but cannot act; the adult must act but has no opportunity tostudy; and we accept the divorce complacently. (Livingstone, 1949)

Adult education is premised on the need for continued equipment for life rather than aone-off preparation and also on the importance of persons with responsibilities in societybeing able to match re� ection and action. There have been many de� nitions, but aninternationally accepted one emerged from the UNESCO general conference of 1976 aspart of a very much longer recommendation on the development of adult education. Itwas arrived at after extensive preliminary consultation among adult education interestsand a powerful advocacy campaign by the non-governmenta l International Council forAdult Education:

the term ‘adult education’ denotes the entire body of organised educationalprocesses, whatever the content, level and method, whether formal or other-wise, whether they prolong or replace initial education in schools, colleges anduniversities as well as in apprenticeship, whereby persons regarded as adult bythe society to which they belong develop their abilities, enrich their knowl-edge, improve their technical or professional quali� cations and bring aboutchanges in their attitudes or behaviour in the twofold perspective of fullpersonal development and participation in balanced and independent social,economic and cultural development; adult education, however, must not beconsidered as an entity in itself, it is a sub-division, and an integral part of aglobal scheme for lifelong education and learning.

The term ‘lifelong education and learning’, for its part, denotes an overallscheme aimed both at restructuring the existing education system and atdeveloping the entire educational potential outside the education system; insuch a scheme, men and women are the agents of their own education, throughcontinual interaction between their thoughts and actions. (UNESCO, 1976)

Commendably clear for an international document, this covers a formula for characteris-ing adulthood, gives a comprehensive de� nition of education, recognises the distinctionbetween education and learning and sets adult education into a ‘lifelong education and

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learning’ context. It also picks up an important theme in twentieth century adulteducation, the autonomy of the learner.

What has been said and quoted should indicate why theorists and practitioners of adulteducation were in the last century in the forefront of advocacy for and the conceptual-isation of lifelong education and learning.

Themes and Preoccupations

The danger with a concept as broad as lifelong learning is that it can become ameaningless slogan, seen as utopian, and at the end of the twentieth century it wasbecoming a less powerful concept in international institutions. The 1990 JomtienConference took place in Adult Literacy Year, but the resultant programme of Educationfor All was almost entirely an agenda for basic schooling for children. This can partlybe explained by the dominance in the whole EFA process of the World Bank, but alsoby the stubborn persistence in many politicians’ minds of an ‘either-or’ approach toeducational provision—either the state provides schooling for the young or it providesit for adults, rather than a grasp of the complementarity of child and adult learning.

Nevertheless, some of the themes and preoccupations in what has been described asa movement for lifelong learning (Wain, 1987) will have resonance in the twenty-� rstcentury. At the least, some educational provision will have to cater for adults, for all thereasons adduced by proponents of lifelong learning at UNESCO, classically stated byPaul Lengrand (1975). He structured his argument round the need for adaptability tochange and reminded readers of changes in demography, in family structures, technol-ogy, work patterns and political life. All these areas will be subjected to even moreradical and swifter change in the new century and will require constant learning bypeople of all ages. It is hackneyed to talk about the need to adapt to new technologies,but sometimes the way these technologies affect ordinary people are not foreseen. TakeSouth Africa, where an often non-literate workforce suddenly has wages paid through abank and to access cash has to use automatic teller machines. Everywhere, there arepeople who need educational support to help them adapt. Will we have the will andability to foresee where such help will be needed?

Within the enveloping whirlwind of change, are there solid supports on which to hold?Some of the themes within lifelong learning as it was built up in the last century couldprovide such supports. They include a rationale based on the notion of human rights,different perceptions of the arenas and vehicles for learning, a linking of learning withdevelopment and an emphasis on participation.

Human Rights and Lifelong Learning

The evolution of an international framework of human rights conventions was a resultof the experiences of the twentieth century, was made possible by the means ofcommunication available and can be seen as an achievement of that century. Thecontribution of the framework to lifelong learning is in the assertion of education as abasic human right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed by the UnitedNations General Assembly in 1948 (although with eight abstentions) included theassertion that “Everyone has the right to education”. Subsequent conventions � eshed thisout, including the 1960 one against discrimination in education which includes theencouragement “by appropriate methods” of education for those who have missed out onschooling and the 1979 convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination

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against women, Article 10 of which says: “States Parties shall take all appropriatemeasures to eliminate discrimination against women in order to ensure to them equalrights with men in the � eld of education” (Ghandhi, 1995).

Such a framework is used in this paper as a rationale and justi� cation for somevery particular activities in adult education. It is not the only framework for studyingliteracy programmes or the role of gender in lifelong learning, but has been chosen hereas a unifying concept apparent in much innovating adult educational endeavour in thelate twentieth century and with potential signi� cance for such endeavour in thetwenty-� rst.

The Right to Literacy

As said, a rights perspective makes sense of several educational phenomena ofthe twentieth century which carry forward to the twenty-� rst. One is the effort put intoadult literacy programmes. Without the basic possession of literacy no one can gain theirright to education or have access to many of their other rights. From the late 1940sthrough the 1980s there was an international thrust for literacy and many individualcountries, such as India, Nicaragua and Egypt made a serious commitment to wideningaccess to literacy. Through the work of Paulo Freire and others, it was accepted thatliteracy could enhance con� dence, help the process of individual and communityempowerment and give excluded people a crucial leverage to shift the power balancebetween themselves and the owners of education. Recently, ‘the new literacy studies’pioneered by social anthropologists such as Brian Street (1993) have made it plain thatchanging the power balance is less simple than it seemed to Freire, because literacyinvolves a variety and hierarchy of literacies relevant in differing socio-politicalcontexts.

There were positive successes in the spread of basic literacy. The proportion of adultpopulations (i.e. those over the age of 15) who have achieved skills of literacy andnumeracy increased in every region of the world between 1950 and 2000. The changesin the percentages of non-literates (the illiteracy rate) have been estimated by UNESCOand are shown in Table I.

This still, however, leaves an un� nished agenda. First, while the proportions ofnon-literates are declining, the actual numbers are rising, owing to rapid populationincreases. Whereas there were 705 million adult non-literates in the world in 1950,there were 854 million in 1970 (of whom 528 million were women) and an estimated876 million in 2000 (of whom 563 million were women). There are therefore stillvery large numbers of people over the age of 15 who are excluded from even the verybeginning of educational access. Second, the kind of literacy generally provided

TABLE I. Percentages of non-literates by re-gion, 1950 and 2000

Region 1950 2000

Africa 84% 40%Asia 63% 25%Latin America/Caribbean 42% 12%Rest of World 7% 1%

Source: UNESCO.

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is meagre in amount and quality. Most countries have a very restricted de� nitionof literacy and devote such small resources to adult literacy programmes that theteaching is of low quality. Instructors are often trained for only a few days andnot motivated since they are either ill paid or not paid at all. Most literacy pro-grammes are very far from delivering the kind of learning experience that Paulo Freireenvisioned.

The signs in the 1990s were that most countries were running out of steam in adultliteracy provision. The twenty-� rst century will fail many millions of people if govern-ments and the international community do not revivify the literacy endeavour.

Gender Awareness and Lifelong Learning Opportunities

Another rights-linked education phenomenon has been the opening up of more educa-tional opportunities for women. The steady strengthening of gender awareness through-out the twentieth century meant that more women had more education than at anyprevious stage of human history. This is an achievement not to be disparaged. That said,in all countries women have less access to the full-range of educational opportunitiesthan men. In countries of High Human Development, there are still de� ciencies incurricula, both in and out of formal education, in terms of adequate treatment of genderissues, and also in terms of decision-making about types of adult learning encouragedand sponsored for women. But there is a grave difference between women’s educationalopportunities in countries of High HD and the rest of the world. The 1999 HumanDevelopment Report (UNDP, 1999) shows an almost even gender balance in enrolmentsin formal education in the 45 top countries. However, in the averages for the 94 countriesof Medium HD, the ratios of women to men are more uneven and are shown in TableII.

For the 35 countries of Low HD, the average ratios are shown in Table III.As usual, averages mask extremes. In many poor African countries the ratios of

women to men are less than 50% in primary education and less than 20% in secondary.Learning beyond school is not an option for those who have never been to school. Thetwenty-� rst century challenge is here again about overcoming very great inequality. Thehuman rights agenda is not only un� nished, it may be in danger of attrition to the pointof meaninglessness.

Arenas for Learning

Some twentieth-century developments widened both perceptions and actual possibilitiesof alternative arenas for learning, away from formal educational institutions. Thedevelopments were economic, political and technical.

TABLE II. Ratios of women to menat different levels of education,Medium Human DevelopmentCountries, 1997

Primary Education 85.5%Secondary Education 59.9%Tertiary 71.0%

Source: UNDP.

TABLE III. Ratios of men andwomen in education, Low HumanDevelopment Countries, 1997

Primary Education 50.4%Secondary Education 21.1%Tertiary n.a.

Source: UNDP.

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Economic necessity for constant re-skilling in workplaces and the professionsencouraged such ideas as refresher courses, continuing professional developmentand capacity building. Activities of such kinds were often led by non-educatorsand carried on in factories, hotels, conference centres, purpose-designed trainingcentres.

Political ideologies in many developing countries crystallised round the mobilisationof communities and saw political parties as agencies for learning and for facilitatingothers’ learning. An example of this approach is the exhortation of Mao Tse-tung ofChina to his party cadres.

No political party can possibly lead a great revolutionary movement to victoryunless it possesses revolutionary theory and a knowledge of history and has aprofound practical grasp of the movement. … Complacency is the enemy ofstudy. We cannot really learn anything until we rid ourselves of complacency.Our attitude towards ourselves should be ‘to be insatiable in learning’ andtowards others ‘to be tireless in teaching’. (Mao Tse-tung, 1938)

Other politicians with quite other political standpoints also saw their parties or move-ments as vehicles for learning and teaching, ranging from M.K. Gandhi in India toSam Nujoma in Namibia. Clearly political education should have a place in othercontexts besides that of major political-economic change, whether willed by thecommunity or externally driven, and a task for twenty-� rst century adult educators mayhave to be the � nding of other dynamics for political learning than decolonisation orrevolution.

Even without technological change, many people have become habituated to learningin places and organisations unconnected with formal education. New communicationsclearly broadened the scope for learning within the home, � rst through correspondence,radio and television and now through the latest information technologies and the Internet.The use of new technologies has been taken up with remarkable speed. It took 38 yearsfor the � rst 50 million people to own radios, only 16 years for the same number to ownpersonal computers, and only 4 years for that number to gain access to the world-wideweb (Economist, 1998). This shows both the adaptability of human beings and theirappetite for easy and rapid communication. The Internet provides an almost limitlessarena for knowledge, although it is not yet known how many people are using the newICTs for purposeful learning. There are moves, however, in several countries to develop‘e-universities’.

With the twenty-� rst century entering a brave new era of borderless learning, there areat least two serious danger signals. Both are quite widely known, but are not yet beingfully faced up to.

One is the displacement and devaluation of all knowledge systems other than thoseemanating from the countries of the North (or more speci� cally from the largecorporations which control the kind of knowledge available through their hardwareand software. Throughout the twentieth century, the culture and knowledge of theNorth predominated in formal educational arenas, but local knowledge was not by-passed as it now will be. An example of this change is the African Virtual Universityset up on the very campus of Makerere University in Uganda, which purveys knowledgegenerated entirely in North America and makes no use at all of the scholars working atMakerere.

Exclusion of non-Northern knowledge systems is compounded by the lack of accessof poor countries in the South to the new technologies. Large parts of South Asia

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and Africa do not have reliable (or any) telephone services outside major cities andthe majority of the populations in poorer countries could not afford the equipment.In countries of high human development there are 502 main telephones, on average,for every thousand people; in countries of low human development, there areonly 4 telephones for every thousand. High human development countries average204.5 personal computers per thousand population; for low human developmentcountries the number is too low to be signi� cant. For poorer countries (and for poorerpeople in rich countries) learning by means of the new ICT is not even a remotepossibility.

Learning, Development and Participation

What has been said so far tends to suggest that some of the main legacies ofthe twentieth century in the � elds of lifelong education and learning are likely tobe vitiated by the widening gap in access to all kinds of education as well as tothe new media for distributing knowledge. A twenty-� rst century Marx could analysethe world in terms of the knowledge-rich becoming richer, and the knowledge-poor becoming poorer. Are there alternatives to this scenario? Just possibly, the searchfor markets will lead the Internet barons to provide technological infrastructures incountries that are without (already one has announced his intention to set up a free‘e-university’).

More likely, new styles of lifelong learning will develop on the margins of newtechnologies and will operate in community-centred ways. They will probably comefrom two other themes in twentieth century lifelong education and learning: developmentand participation. As pointed out earlier, random learning needs to be analysed and putin order, that is to be clustered round a set of principles, and development andparticipation have provided those principles in many settings.

Discussing learning in the context of development, Anne Bernard (1991) wrote:

Much more central in the learning process is the increasing ability to predictconsequences, weigh alternatives, perceive comparative advantage and dis-tinguish salient characteristics of a situation. It involves the individual’senhanced awareness of self and community as active agents with both thecapacity and the right to in� uence life conditions: that they are not simplypawns in the hands of either fate or the outside expert. It includes developingcapacities of analysis, synthesis and evaluative judgement; abilities which inturn enable one to search out, exchange and interpret information, and fromthere to solve problems and make decisions.

Development-related learning is learning related to action, to problem-solving andinitiating change. In the twentieth century, it was linked to ideas of communitydevelopment and community education and there have been many experiences oftransformation through organised learning. A few examples are: The Self-EmployedWomen’s Association (SEWA) in Ahmedabad in India, who took hold of literacy to helpthem gain a livelihood; Mondragon in Spain, where learning combined with co-operativeeconomic enterprise lifted a community out of poverty; church congregations in Africawho have studied to improve their environment and made measurable differences inhygiene and health.

The likely continued strength of such modes of learning stems from the fact that they

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are initiated by the people themselves (with or without outside assistance). Manytwentieth century ventures in adult learning were built on a commitment to popularparticipation. Learning takes place in a social organisation controlled by its members,who therefore themselves control and negotiate their own learning. The experience of thelast century was that while in many such organisations there was a strong desire to relatelearning to livelihood, there was also a desire to confront universal human problems suchas environment, power in society, citizenship, human rights, cultural identity. Curriculabased on these problems will be humanistic, often also political in the widest sense.

In the twentieth century, learning related to development and participation grew upmainly in the countries of the South, but began to be adopted in the North. The wholesystem of community education in Scotland, for instance, was in� uenced by practice inLatin America and Africa. A continuation of this � ow of ideas from South to Northmight provide a counterweight to the globalisation phenomenon, in which Northernknowledge only is validated.

The Long View

The argument has been that the last century made considerable innovations in adulteducation as part of lifelong education and learning, including the establishment ofeducation for all as a right, the diffusion of literacy and greater educational access forwomen. It also spread the facilitation of learning into many locations away from formalinstitutions and linked learning opportunities with new media.

At the same time we are left with a legacy of problems of social and educationaldivision and exclusion. While the problems are large, the palliatives or solutions may besmall and on the margin, in local communities or groups. The types of ‘popular’ learninginvolved will at least help people to come to terms with the knowledge explosion andto think critically about it.

A hundred years on, present technologies will have long been superseded and muchpresent-day knowledge will have been forgotten. Human beings are, however, still likelyto want to enhance their self-awareness and gain tools to interpret and understand theirworld. Lifelong education at the end of the twenty-� rst century will certainly comprisethese curricular elements. How they will be delivered and what resources will beavailable is material for science � ction, but one hopes that any policy context, nationallyand internationally, will be based on some underlying principle of social justice.

Correspondence: Lalage Bown, 1 Dogpole Court, Dogpole, Shrewsbury SY1 1ES, UK.

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DAVIDSON, T. (1898) Quoted H. GRATTAN (1959) American Ideas About Adult Education, 1710–1951 (NewYork, Teachers’ College, Columbia University).

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