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Our knowledge is like a map by which we steer our way through the natural (and therefore the social) world. Such maps are better or worse to the extent that they enable us to do better than chance in both formulating good goals and attaining them. The case for lifelong learning resides largely in the fact that in important respects our knowledge goes out of date more rapidly nowadays, either because the world changes in ways that render the map less useful for navigation, or because inquiry leads to new knowledge that renders the old obsolete.

Drawing on work in the tradition of naturalistic epistemology, in general, and cognitive neuroscience, in particular, this chapter attempts to cash out the map metaphor by defending a view of both the representation and the dynamics of knowledge.

Arguing from this perspective, a general thesis about epistemically progressive inquiry across the lifespan is proposed that has the following features: it is holist in that it applies in the same way to a range of different areas of inquiry; it is empirical in that it takes into account feedback from experience; it is coherentist in that knowledge is justified by appeal to coherence criteria of justification; and it is naturalistic in that models of cognitive biological mechanisms are proposed that realize this view of the nature of knowledge, representation, and inquiry.

This paper starts from the position that lifelong learning is more than is assumed in current policy rhetoric. This rhetoric focuses on training for a ‘knowledge economy’ in which all citizens play their part. We argue that this rhetoric depends on a view of knowledge as instrumental, individual and disembodied. Against this we propose a notion of knowledge as social, embodied and reflexive about its own roots in time and space. It is this notion that underpins the richer, more democratic notion of lifelong learning which we explore in this essay using examples drawn from various, diverse sites, especially museum and art education ‘from cradle to grave’.

In this chapter I will put lifelong learning as discursive policy and practice under a postmodern lens, even whilst recognizing from the outset that there is no such single lens but rather a multiplicity. Nonetheless certain common themes can be detected and these will hopefully emerge in the course of examining lifelong learning in this way.

For my reading, I will draw upon two philosophers who perhaps more than any others exemplify the postmodern turn in scholarly discourses and do so in perhaps the most extreme form. The first is Baudrillard and I will look at his notions of and to read lifelong learning in the context of a society of signs where lifelong learning is located in lifestyle practices based on the consumption of signs. The second is Deleuze with his notions of and . Lifelong learning can be read both as being trapped in the repressive and homogenizing strata of contemporary capitalism whilst also being a rhizomatic practice that is lifewide as well as lifelong, surfacing in a variety of spaces and entwined in other practices.

My reading will be something of an extreme reading but deliberately so, in order to draw out the philosophical underpinnings of the postmodern and then through that to critique some of the assumptions that undergird dominant understandings of lifelong learning.

The translation of lifelong learning theory into educational practice raises a number of important issues. Although these issues are, to some extent at least, immanent to the theory, the experience of them is heightened in periods of educational reform associated with the implementation of lifelong learning theory. Here I examine what are arguably the more important of these issues - those arising from the focus in lifelong learning theory on learning outcomes and on the existential realities of individual learners. These positions have led to charges of value relativism, of the privatisation of educational responsibility and of mis-education through a wide range of effects, including the loss of curricular coherence, a pre-occupation with training, a focus on learning in non-educational contexts, the commodification of education, an erosion of important conceptual distinctions and a focus on issues of immediate interest or concern.

While I argue that the claim or experience of value relativism is a serious and potentially disabling misreading of lifelong learning theory, the privatisation of educational responsibility is an inherent feature in more welfare-driven contexts of reform. However, charges of miseducation are sustainable only from educational perspectives that are significantly divergent from that of lifelong learning theory. From a lifelong learning perspective, educational reform in such oppositional contexts may be resisted and subverted, but its quality should fall short of its theoretical potential only to the extent that its implementation is denied, diminished or subverted.

These issues would seem to be likely to affect adversely the quality of lifelong learning practice and to generate opposition and resistance to it. To understand the issues and how they may be managed could be important in minimising their adverse effects. This chapter is directed to furthering that understanding.

This paper is in two parts. In the first we explore traditional tools of philosophy (conceptual analysis, ethical reflection, and epistemological critique) applied to education (the philosophy of education) in the context of lifelong learning. Analysis of “lifelong learning” demonstrates how conceptual analysis increases clarity and yields ethical and epistemological questions worthy of exploration. In the second, less traditional part of the paper, we take seriously the pragmatism at the heart of the movement to, and concept of lifelong learning. We develop a notion of practical philosophy. This draws on Wittgensteinian ideas (“Look and See”). We illustrate ‘practical philosophy’ by reference to the use of narrative in educational research and the practices of pragmatic disciplines such as engineering. Practical philosophy finds a new kind of synthesis of educational theory and practice. It will be shown, too, how practical philosophy, though practical, remains genuinely philosophical.

Lifelong learning, like democracy, is a highly contested term with its meanings closely tied to theories of socio-economic development. As with democracy, lifelong learning can stay at the symbolic or rhetorical levels. Moving it from this to considered policies and practices reveals how complex and contextually enmeshed it is. The development of ‘learning regions’ in various parts of the world provides fertile ground for understanding how lifelong learning is enmeshed in the socio-economic and political approaches in a region. In this chapter, the development of indicators in one learning region is used as a vehicle for highlighting how complex and contested lifelong learning is. It is also used to identify a range of paradoxes, which are at the heart of lifelong learning.

The title is deliberately ambiguous. The argument will consider what currently counts as lifelong learning in the context of changing political and educational trends in advanced capitalist societies and why it is necessary to interrogate and challenge particular interpretations that are currently dominant and fashionable.

By the turn of the twenty-first century it was being recognised that global networks and social movements were gathering widespread public involvement. Reflecting on its Millennium Campaign on Third World Debt, Jubilee 2000 argued that ‘the world will never be the same again’ as a result of huge numbers of people from civil society movements in both North and South mobilising to challenge the negative effects of globalisation, through citizen action, in solidarity beyond the nation state, to transform global agendas (Jubilee 2000). Through non-governmental organisations (NGOs), community based organisations (CBOs), social movements, issue campaigns and policy advocacy, citizens are finding ways to have their voices heard and to influence the decisions and practices of larger institutions that affect their lives - both locally and globally.

The rediscovery of the democratic significance of civil society is to be found in the rhetoric of government policy making - in the language of active citizenship, community participation and empowerment. But the issues involved are both complex and contested. As capital has gone global it has served to undermine the sovereignty of the nation state whilst putting pressure on rich and poor countries alike to maximise profit and cut back on public expenditure. The same processes are at work that talk of modernisation in the welfare states of the rich world and structural adjustment programmes in the poor world - the costs of which, in both contexts, are most likely to be borne by those who can afford them least. Questions and legitimate grievances abound but answers and solutions are in short supply. Social movements may pursue regressive as well as progressive goals, just as they may lead to the incorporation of dissent by the state rather than the challenging of inequality and social injustice.

What part does lifelong learning play in these developments? The roots of radical adult education lie in the real interests and struggles of ordinary people, in education that is overtly political and critical of the status quo and which is committed to progressive social and political change. But increasingly the role of education, particularly adult education and lifelong learning, is seen as preparing flexible workers for risk and uncertainty. Competitive advantage in the global economy apparently requires skills and training rather than curiosity, creativity and critical thinking. As collective welfare structures are being dismantled the provision of lifelong learning becomes the means by which the behaviour of individuals is modified for the brave new world of responsible and entrepreneurial citizenship. The onus is firmly on the individual to take individual responsibility for self improvement in economic and social circumstances within which individuals actually have little control. The structural distance between those who thrive and those who merely survive or go to the wall is greater now than when the present government came to power.

At a time when a quarter of a million ordinary members of civil society marched around Edinburgh to in the run up to the G8 summit, and the consequence of terrorist suicide bombers in London now threatens to destroy the uneasy settlement that characterises race relations in Britain, the dominant discourse in adult learning appears engaged from social and political action. And yet the ideas and beliefs which interpret the world and inform the provision of lifelong learning are supremely political in their purpose. The debate is preoccupied with fetishised frameworks for quality and accreditation, instrumentalism in relation to skills, the creation and measurement of individualised notions of achievement and a sickly rhetoric about confidence and self esteem that represents adult education as a form of therapy concerned with self improvement. In this context lifelong learning for the poor has everywhere become a condition of Benefit, employment or citizenship, designed to keep people busy.

The latest NIACE survey of participation in adult learning (Aldrige and Tuckett 2005) reveals that fewer people are currently engaged in learning than when the present Labour Government came to power in 1997. However prescriptive and instrumental the learning agenda has become, we can draw some comfort from the fact that its actual grip on most people’s lived reality is minimal. In this kind of policy climate, with this kind of professional compliance, the sort of adult education that once called itself a movement, that in the words of Raymond Williams should be a resource to ordinary people for a journey of hope, has been cut off from its roots.

When the current state of lifelong learning gets written about by future historians it will no doubt illustrate at least two well known clichés of the age to do with rearranging deckchairs and fiddling whilst Rome burns.