LIFELONG LEARNING IN UK

Lifelong Learning in UK

Lifelong Learning in UK

Section 1

Traditionally formal education has been a process whereby the older generation passes down to the young ones the knowledge and skill which the former has considered worthwhile. In as much as it did this and no other social agency performed this function, it had high status, with teachers also being very highly regarded in society and those individuals employed in the upper echelons of education having very high social status. While it might be claimed that this is still one of the functions of children's education, it is harder to make this claim for post-school education. Indeed, post-school education can now last a lifetime. More significantly, there are fewer guardians of 'correct' knowledge since it is possible to learn from a very wide variety of information transmitting agencies. They can learn from books, from correspondence courses, from audio recordings, from the Web and so on. Indeed, they can learn the same things as the formal institution might have provided them but without being enrolled in it. For instance I might have enrolled in a Chinese class to learn the language before coming here, or I might have bought a CD to teach myself: the former is educational but the latter is self-directed learning. They can also do this throughout the whole of their lives there is no upper age limit to accessing the Web! Now the emphasis is on lifelong learning and universities are having to recognize that adults of all ages, and not just young adults, want to benefit from continued learning. This is forcing them to re-think their position in society and also to consider the type of students who might enroll with them; indeed, in UK the Dearing Report (1997) was concerned with making universities institutions of lifelong learning. In addition, Campbell (1984) has shown that that there were more adults enrolled in universities in Canada from 1974 onwards than there were young adults.

Foundation disciplines of education, and by extension lifelong learning, tend therefore to lock us into the kind of conceptual boundary divisions which may be unhelpful in the analysis of the public provision of welfare services. And if education policy analysis has any distinct identity this is because it was concerned with the system of public provision. As will be argued later, it is the characteristic of public provision that distinguishes policy from its family of related concepts because it is concerned with politics, power, and control over the ends or outcomes of policy.

Once adults come on to the campthem in large numbers the traditional organisation has to change; now there has to be new types of courses; new ways of teaching; part-time study; courses arranged at convenient times for working adults to attend; the facilities for adult students, and so on. Universities are finding these new demands very hard to respond to. By contrast, adult educators have been delighted at the way greater access to all forms of education has been granted to adults, but ...