The article analyses how citizenship is conceptualised in policy documents of four key international organisations. The basic assumption is that public policy has not turned away from adult learning for active citizenship, but that there are rather new ways in which international governmental organisations conceptualise and in some cases seek to…

This exploratory paper considers the concept of generation in the context of learning across the life course. Although researchers have often found considerable inequalities in participation by age, as well as strongly articulated attitudinal differences, there have so far been only a handful of studies that have explored these patterns through…

Flexibility and change are typically viewed as endemic features of late modernity, leading to increased emphasis on the importance of transition during the adult life course. The paper examines experiences of transition for eight contributors to a research project that collected and analysed life histories as the basis for an understanding of…

Adult learning has benefited from the visibility and profile of lifelong learning across a range of European policy areas. The overall profile of adult learning benefited enormously from the European Commission's decision to group all its education and training programmes together under the brand of the "Lifelong Learning Programme." The…

Since the 1980s, researchers have formed a much better understanding of how unemployment scars people's lives, not just in the short term, but sometimes for years ahead. Researchers differ on the details, but no one disagrees that the negative effects are serious and long term. In the recession of the 1980s, government schemes to improve people's…

Everyone is talking about civil society. Perhaps it's the election, and the shock of seeing more voters at the polling booths than anyone had expected. Now David Cameron's idea of a "big society" is being translated into some early policy measures. Does today's debate have anything to do with adult learning? The author believes that the…

How can people make the most of their lives in a fast-changing world? And how should adult learning help? These are large questions, and the answers are unlikely to be simple or straightforward. Yet if adult learning does not help people to flourish, then it is hard to see why it should enjoy any public support at all. The evidence for the…

Although there is a widely held view that adult learning has a positive impact on well-being, only recently has this proposition been systematically tested. A review of recent research confirms that adult learning has a clear influence on earnings and employability, both of which may influence well-being indirectly. These are more important for…

The Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning proposes a strategy for lifelong learning for the next quarter-century. In this article, four of the Inquiry's commissioners--Leisha Fullick, John Field, Teresa Rees and Helen Gilchrist--reflect on some of the report's key themes. Fullick discusses the role of "local responsiveness" in…

There are potential problems and unanswered questions with the "Learning Society" in which all are called to be permanent learners: (1) what kind of learning? (2) who learns and who benefits? and (3) what are the consequences? Lifelong learning, especially when economic objectives are emphasized, can create more exclusion as well as…

Compares developments in lifelong learning in the 1990s, especially its emergence on government policy agendas, with its origins in the 1960s-1970s. Shows that the lifelong learning rhetoric about educational opportunities has become a justification for reducing public resources, creating new inequities. (Contains 43 references.) (SK)

Explores forms of social capital and the relationship between human and social capital. Depicts the relationship between high and low social capital and initial educational attainment, participation in continuing education and training, and participation in nonformal education. (SK)

A review of the European Union's adult continuing education (ACE) and training policies concludes that most national systems of ACE are already multifaceted and flexible; the European Union's policy focus on economic growth and competitiveness intensifies environmental degradation and economic inequities; and European Union financial support may…

The European Union is reshaping its education and training programs to focus on the need for the whole community to learn throughout life. However, resources continue to be targeted mostly on initial schooling and undergraduate education. (SK)

The opportunities paradigm assumes that participation in lifelong learning is positive and voluntary, yet discourse analysis reveals pervasive pressure to be permanent learners. Recent research suggests that learners may switch between discourses of compulsion and self-realization, and they may combine participant and nonparticipant identities.…