Entgrenzungen des Lernens - Internationale Perspektiven für die Erwachsenenbildung

On the Right Hand of Lifelong Education (S. 137-138)

Licínio C. Lima

Introduction My main aim in this chapter is to present a critical perspective on the current economicist, managerialist and technocratic trends in lifelong education and training. I intend to question what Barry Hake (2006, p. 35) critically called “learning for earning” or, in more generic terms, the ability lifelong education and training has to provide a certain type of solutions – predominantly individual and adaptive in nature – for structural social problems of great complexity.

This partial and limited perspective of lifelong education, which is merely functional in view of the objectives of the economy and new capitalism competitiveness, will be metaphorically referred to as “the right hand of lifelong education”. My argument may be set forth as follows. In seeking to adapt perfectly to the social structure, the economy and competitiveness, lifelong education becomes an untenable politico-educational project, definitively breaking off from its humanistic and critical roots. Its veritable educational dimensions are heavily diluted while the training and learning modalities that take the foreground are exclusively or predominantly at the service of economic adjustment.

It is thus transformed into “qualification”, “skills acquirement” and “human resources management” programmes in which it is often considerably difficult to find a substantive educational project. In such cases, one can speak of the triumph of an educational policy centred on “vocationalist” and continuous vocational training “logics of action”, which is not only rarely able to value some of the most relevant critical traditions of adult education, popular education, political and civic education and education for democratic citizenship, but also to articulate the objectives, the practices and the pedagogical work methodologies of these approaches (see Lima 2007a).

A lifelong education project cannot shy away from the problems affecting the economy, society, work and employment, but neither can it withstand the amputation of its social, ethical and political responsibilities as well as of its possible contributions towards the creation of dynamics leading to the positive transformation of the conditions of human existence even within the most resilient of social organisations.

I am therefore seeking to understand the mutations that have been taking place in this field as well as the ambiguities and contradictions that have arisen from the different political and social perspectives that have been built around the polysemous concept of lifelong education. Not only do I highlight its democratic potential but I also bring to the foreground the economicist and technocratic meanderings which are widely subject to issues of employability and competitive performance.