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offered by lifelong learning. This notion has been taken seriously by community groups,
who have articulated and promoted other versions, styles and patterns of lifelong learning.
In addition to the provision of lifelong opportunities available through traditional institutions
and agencies, there is a trend for offering opportunities for lifelong learning by the creation
and expansion of a range of community initiatives.
This version of the community as an agency and forum for lifelong learning flourishes in the
realisation that those engaging in lifelong learning enjoy a range of additional options, from
which they may construct a satisfying and enriching pattern of life-enhancing activities
(White 1982).
Lifelong learning offers people the opportunity to bring up to date their knowledge of
activities which they had either previously laid aside or always wanted to try but were
unable; to try out activities and pursuits that they had previously imagined were outside
their time or competence; or to work at extending their intellectual horizons by seeking to
understand and master some of the recent cognitive advances, that have transformed their
worlds.
However, lifelong learning is not restricted to those beyond the age of education in formal
or institutional settings. The expansion of cognitive repertoire and the increasing of skills
and competences can continue throughout life, as a vital part of people's growth and
development as human beings and as citizens in a participative democracy, as well as
being productive agents in economic advancement. Individual and community welfare is
protected and promoted by making such activities, and the resources to support them,
available to the widest range of constituencies. Smethurst puts this well : Is education a
public or a private good? The answer is, neither: it is both. There is some education that is
overwhelmingly a public good in that its benefits accrue very widely, to society at large as
well as to the individual.
Equally there is some education which, while benefiting society, confers overwhelming
benefits on the individual learner. But much of education sits annoyingly between these
two extremes, leading us, correctly, to want to influence the amount and type of it supplied
and demanded, because society has an interest in the outcome, but also to note that it
confers benefits on the individual above those societal benefits (Smethurst 1995:44).
Lifelong learning is a public good, for the benefit and welfare of everyone in society, not
just the preserve of a few.
mutually beneficial modes of action. Society has an interest in securing, providing and
safeguarding those conditions and services required by our participation in democratic life.
These conditions are provided, at least in part, by the contributions that those who benefit
from them make to the common wealth via a publicly funded exchequer.
This is what taxes are for - and those with different levels of resources contribute to the
exchequer differentially as a result and in proportion. This contribution grants us access to
those goods that society makes available for enjoyment by all its members. That
contribution brings out the mutual beneficence and inter-dependence of our economic
arrangements for funding and running our society and providing appropriate levels and
kinds of service for the benefit of all its constituents throughout their lives - including
those, who because of history, handicap, weakness or sheer misfortune may not able to
contribute much to it at the moment but still need its support. This makes society and its
various institutions, especially educating institutions, the places, sites and settings in which
individuals can develop their pattern of preferred life-options, and so increase their
autonomy, and in which all sections of the community co-operate mutually for the benefit
of the societal whole.
The concept of education as a 'public good' and the responsibility we all share for the
mutual benefit of all members of society are fundamental to this version of the need for
'lifelong learning for all'. R H Tawney (Tawney 1938) believed that engagement in adult
education was a necessary pre-requisite to and continuing part of participation in the
institutions of democracy. Ensuring for all future citizens their liberation from ignorance and
potential servitude and exploitation is secured by guaranteeing them access to all forms
and fields of human knowledge, understanding and communication in a high quality, wideranging and dynamic curriculum in a wide range of institutions devoted to the education of
the present and future electorate. Such a curriculum provides people with one of the
principal means of personal empowerment, emancipated understanding and informed
choice in exercising the duties and responsibilities of a citizen in a participative or
representative democracy
We need in these principles and ideals of social inclusiveness, justice and equity; an
economy which is strong, adaptable and competitive; and a range of provision of activities
on which people choose for the rewards and satisfactions they confer. To bring this about a
substantial re-appraisal of the provision, resourcing and goals of education and training,
and a major re-orientation of its direction towards the concept and value of the idea of 'the
learning society' is required. This is the major challenge for governments, policy-makers
and educators as they seek to conceptualise lifelong learning and articulate policies to
realise the aim of 'lifelong learning for all'.
A helpful analogy is that of Neurath (1932). The theory that we work out in our educational
endeavours is like a boat travelling across the sea. Because of the continuing stresses and
strains upon it, the craft that is our best theory has continually to be repaired and rebuilt
even as it crosses the ocean, while it is still on the move, so to speak - and in a way that
will, while still giving overall coherence to the whole, make for a vessel that, at the end of
the enterprise of theory building, is much different from the 'theoretic vessel' upon which
the journey began. For human beings, the 'end' of the journey comes when we die: it is part
of the human cognitive condition that we are always re-building our theories. It is the end
of the journey of our lives that marks the end of theory-change.
Critical to this enterprise of theory/vessel building and repairing and to the pragmatic
criteria with which we work is the need continuously to look at all plans, theories and forms
of cognitive transport, drawn up both by ourselves and others, in the attempt to see how
well they manage to fulfil their function of conveying their passengers and their intellectual
impedimenta an as yet uncharted 'sea '. The criterion of success in any cognitive
endeavour will be: has our thinking gained the end towards which it was striving? This
involves subjecting our theories, beliefs, policies and solutions to critical scrutiny, appraisal
and comparison. This will enable us to assess their effect in meeting the challenges of the
problem situations in which we have devised and applied them as we travel to our goals.
This then is the nature of our enterprise. Neither logical empiricism, positivism, nor
ordinary language analysis will do as single or 'would be' comprehensive theories to
account for soundness in our educational policies or effectiveness in our provision of
lifelong learning opportunities. We need to adopt a pragmatic' evolutionary epistemology',
an approach that goes 'beyond objectivism and relativism' (Bernstein 1983) and facilitates
discriminatory theory construction and comparison and so makes our own theories meet
for application, modification and repair at every stage of our intellectual journey.
We believe that adopting a pragmatic approach will serve us well in our search for solution
of one of the most pressing problems in education today: how best can we face the
challenges posed by the need for our policies of education and learning to be 'lifelong'?.
Let us conceive of our enterprise as an activity of problem-solving and proffering solutions
as tentative hypotheses to be, if possible, knocked down (Popper 1972).
In this endeavour we need to seek out all possible sources of criticism and potential
refutation. If we find one that falsifies our proposed solutions, then, from whatever quarter
of the cognitive community it might come, we should be open-minded enough to admit it.
We can then treat it on its merits as a source, not only of criticism and further clarification
but as an attempt to help provide solutions and best provisional theories for application to
the difficulties that beset us and the predicaments that perplex us on the road to finding
policies that will best address the problems facing us. That is why we need education and
learning to be lifelong.
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