lifelong learning: flexibility and the corrosion of

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‘In and against’ lifelong learning: flexibility and the corrosion of character JIM CROWTHER a

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INT. J. OF LIFELONG EDUCATION, VOL. 23, NO. 2 (MARCH–APRIL 2004), 125–136

‘In and against’ lifelong learning: flexibility and the corrosion of character

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JIM CROWTHER University of Edinburgh, UK

This paper argues against the dominant discourse of lifelong learning. It is primarily a mode of social control that acts as a new disciplinary technology to make people more compliant and adaptable for work in the era of flexible capitalism. Whilst the main reference point is trends in the UK, the argument has a wider resonance. Lifelong learning diminishes the public sphere, undermines educational activity, introduces new mechanisms of self-surveillance and reinforces the view that failure to succeed is a personal responsibility. It is ultimately a ‘deficit discourse’, which locates the responsibility of economic and political failure at the level of the individual, rather than at the level of systemic problems.

Introduction The word ‘flexibility’ entered the English language in the fifteenth century. Its meaning originally derived from the simple observation that though a tree may bend in the wind, its branches spring back to their original position. ‘Flexibility’ names the tree’s capacity both to yield and to recover, both the testing and the restoration of its form. Ideally, flexible human behaviour ought to have the same tensile strength: adaptable to changing circumstances yet not broken by them . . . The practices of flexibility, however, focus mostly on the forces bending people. (Sennett 1998: 46) The promotion of ‘flexibility’ is fundamental to government policy for the economy because it is seen as essential for business success, prosperity and employment (DTI 1998). Flexibility is associated with a virile and dynamic economy, which lifelong learning primarily supports (DfEE 1998). But it is a mistake to describe the role of flexibility and lifelong learning in such narrow terms. In Sennett’s (1998) insightful analysis of corporate capitalism, flexibility is also corroding character because it is transforming the meaning of work. The role of lifelong learning in this process is the focus of this article. Flexibility involves the reorganization of work to adapt it to short-term trends in the market so that firms can respond rapidly to its fluctuations. According to Sennett, this process has wider ramifications, in that it is changing our Jim Crowther is a lecturer in Adult and Community Education in the Department of Higher and Community Education, University of Edinburgh, Holyrood Campus, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. International Journal of Lifelong Education ISSN 0260-1370 print/ISSN 1464-519X online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0260137042000184174


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expectations so that fewer people see themselves as undertaking the same type of job for life. In addition, we no longer seem to be able to count on acquiring skills for employment that are long lasting. ‘Downsizing’, ‘right sizing’, redundancy, ‘supernumerary to requirements’ and other euphemisms for insecurity and job loss have entered our vocabulary and experience of work. ‘Flexploitation’, as Bourdieu characterizes it, is a new mode of domination ‘based on the creation of a generalised and permanent state of insecurity aimed at forcing workers into submission, into the acceptance of exploitation’ (1998: 85). Uncertainty and insecurity of employment also effects welfare provision, which is increasingly regarded as a time-limited intervention in people’s lives with the emphasis on people acquiring work rather than welfare. The result is that human character, (by which Sennett primarily means the ethical nature of our aspirations and dealings with others) is undermined and aspirations for a more humane and socially just society sidelined. Flexibility claims to be innovative and freeing people from the limits and constraints of outmoded work practices. In contrast, the prior meaning of work that embodied a narrative of predictability and continuity is now a fetter on capitalism’s ability to reproduce itself. If instead people are more versatile and flexible, the claim is that they will have some real control and responsibility for ordering their lives. This new trend in capitalism is apparent in particular occupational areas (e.g. information technologies) and in specific national economies (e.g. the USA) but it is also recognizable in the UK and Europe, although in the latter it is contested terrain between state, employers and unions (Coffield 2002). Flexibility is not, however, simply a feature of high-tech industries and well-paid jobs. It is evident also in increasing numbers of temporary, low-paid and insecure forms of employment in manufacturing and service industries. The consequences of flexibility are regressively distributed (Purcell et al. 1999). The relatively privileged remain secure because they have resources to succeed through the ups and downs of the labour market. Less powerful groups, on the other hand, do not have these advantages or network of contacts to turn insecure employment into a positive opportunity. Instead, the incessant reorganization of work, reshuffling of jobs, short-term contracts and the serial changing of employment weakens the bonds between workers. The bonds that create trust, loyalty and mutual support between people can only be nurtured through establishing long-term commitments. The failure to achieve this has important consequences. The emphasis on self-reliance and work disparages the claims of the needy and the dependent for resources and support. The homeless, poor, unemployed, single parents, the elderly, refugees, asylum seekers, those in receipt of welfare benefits, are all targeted in policy initiatives as either in need of retraining, reskilling or remotivating back into the labour market—or back whence they came. As Thompson points out, lifelong learning ‘represents a late capitalist solution to “investing in people”—in their human, cultural and social capital—as the key to future employment, economic growth, mobility and cohesion’ (2000: 134). It is the universal toolkit adaptable to all circumstances and problems. Despite being broadly welcomed in adult education circles, there is a growing unease with lifelong learning and an emerging body of work that is critical of both its purpose and politics (see Griffin 1999a, 1999b, Martin 2001, 2003, Coffield 2002).

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Flexibility and power In the UK, flexibility has to be seen in terms of a neo-liberal economic agenda with weakened trade union powers (after 20 years of systematic undermining by successive Conservative governments from the 1980s onwards) and where capitalism is the only ideological agenda on offer for managing the economy. In this context, ‘lifelong learning is being used to socialise workers to the escalating demands of employers, who use “empowerment” to disguise an intensification of workloads via increased deregulation; “employability” to make an historic retreat from the policy of full payment and periodic unemployment between jobs more acceptable; and “flexibility” to cover a variety of strategies to reduce costs that increase job insecurity’ (Coffield 2002: 185). Lifelong learning is part of a hegemonic project where the only thing that matters is the economy which is, in any case, more open, democratic and based on expanding people’s opportunities and potential. If only! Power in modern forms of flexibility has three elements according to Sennett: ‘discontinuous reinvention of institutions’; ‘flexible specialization of production’; and ‘concentration of without centralization of power’ (1998: 47). By the discontinuous reinvention of institutions, he means breaks with the pattern of past practices by institutions that essentially reaffirm continuity with underlying inequalities. Flexible specialization of production requires workers willing to acquire new skills and work practices so firms can cut costs and respond to the market and consumer demand. Concentration of without centralization of power involves delegating responsibility and authority but does not change structures of power. It is about incorporating people into an agenda that is already predetermined. All of these new modes of control may provide a resembalance of freedom but the reality is that people are subject ‘to new, top-down controls and surveillance’ (Sennett 1998: 59). This article argues that lifelong learning is part of these new, less visible forms of managing people. Flexibility generates a distinctly new purpose and organization of adult learning, modelled along the lines of a more open, marketised and decentralized system geared towards work and consumerism (Martin 1999). The poverty of the dominant discourse of lifelong learning is not primarily its narrow vocationalism but its hidden agenda of creating malleable, disconnected, transient, disciplined workers and citizens. These developments need to be recognized before they can be resisted. What we need, paradoxically, is less lifelong learning and more adult education aimed at increasing the individual and collective autonomy of communities. It is misleading to see the current fascination for lifelong learning as a more popular form of lifelong education. Something new and more pernicious is happening.

From lifelong education to lifelong learning The acknowledgement of learning beyond compulsory schooling is to be welcomed in the current policy discourse but we need to take care: ‘when governments become interested in lifelong learning, it is as well to be cautious; when they add active citizenship and social inclusion to the list, it may be time to be positively sceptical—not to say suspicious’ (Martin 2001: 4). Separating lifelong learning


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from lifelong education is a useful starting point to help clarify why government’s now seem to embrace the type of concerns adult educators have long espoused. During the 1960s and 1970s progressive educational debate in Europe was dominated by discussion of lifelong education, promoted specifically by United Nations Educational Science Cultural Organization (see Borg and Mayo 2002), and inspired by the failure of post-World War II school reform to create a more socially just and cohesive society. Lifelong education brought together an eclectic range of interests and ideas concerned with moral and political issues about the nature of society and the contribution of education to it in economic, political, social and cultural terms. The student movement, educational deschoolers, ‘future-gazers’ and the communications revolution contributed to this trend (see Field 2000). The debate fostered about lifelong education was tied to the idea of the ‘good society’ and how the structure and curriculum of education could be part of its making. Its proponents stressed the importance of education arising from and contributing to people’s lives in rounded terms. This was contested terrain but one primarily influenced by a humanist ideology concerned with personal growth in an increasingly consumer culture that emphasized having—one of the key reports by Faure (1972) was titled Learning to Be! These concerns and interests are now marginal to the current policy discourse of lifelong learning. Lifelong learning benefited from the progressive agenda of lifelong education by making it more acceptable to a wide range of conflicting ideological interests. At times the two are used interchangeably despite important conceptual differences and the difference of context in which they emerged. However, the cuckoo of lifelong learning has well and truly kicked out of the policy discourse its adopted sibling. As Griffin suggests, the movement from lifelong education to lifelong learning indicates ‘a major shift in national and international policies for the development of education and learning systems’ (1999a: 392). It is a mistake, therefore, to assume lifelong learning is simply a recasting of the same ideas and values in a new context—the mistake, as Martin (2003) points out, is to think of lifelong learning in educational rather than political terms. It is more accurate to see it as a mode of power wielded through the ‘discontinuous reinventing of institutions’ and aimed at reproducing wider inequalities. The popularity of lifelong learning in Europe was stimulated by the activities of the European Union (and before it the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) through a series of policy papers during the 1990s (see, for instance, CEC 1994). The interest in lifelong learning, according to Murphy (1997), can be traced back to the European Round Table of Industrialists but it was the creation of the Single European Market in 1985 which really got things underway. The Maastricht Treaty (1992) aided this because it enshrined in law a role for the European Union in promoting the educational policies of member states (Tett 2002). These developments taken together spurred the interest in ‘human capital theory’ set in the context of globalization, economic downturn and crises as well as the growth of the so-called ‘Knowledge Society’ and the ‘Information Age’. Two main influences began to shape European Union policy on lifelong learning. The first was the drive for economic competitiveness in a world market dominated by international capital units. These multinational firms, as Murphy points out, ‘in order to take advantage of their new economies of scale, need a flexible and adaptable workforce’ (1997: 364). European Union intervention in promoting lifelong learning aims to sharpen this competitive edge. The second influence was



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the crisis of welfare that European countries faced particularly at a time of pronounced stress on social cohesion through rising unemployment and migration, amongst other things. The conclusion to be drawn from all this, as Murphy suggests ‘is that the needs of the European capitalist class are the ones being met by lifelong learning’ (1997: 364). The linkage to the requirements of European capitalism is not the end of the matter. Lifelong learning is also serving the interests of the new ‘market state’ (Bobbitt 2002), which is replacing the nation state. This new formation (exemplified in the USA and UK) involves a fundamental reconstitution of the legitimacy of the state because it can no longer guarantee the security of its citizens or the general good of the community. In order to regain its legitimacy, the new form of political administration has to shift people’s expectations of it. The compact the ‘market state’ seeks to make with its people is that its role is a strategic one of extending individual choice rather than providing goods and services. These are the responsibility of individuals to achieve for themselves through market transactions. In this context, lifelong learning contributes to redefining citizens as consumers in the market place rather than political actors in the public arena. To meet these challenges, public services are being reorganized along the lines of the private sector and market-driven systems of performance. In the UK context, with its ‘neo-liberal welfare reform policy approach’ (Griffin 1999b: 432), government is less willing to fund education policy and is, instead, shifting the costs of learning onto learners. Lifelong learning, Griffin argues, is disguising the dismantling of the welfare state. Instead of trying to control the outcomes of policy, which characterized old-style policy making, the emphasis is now on government strategy tailored to people’s lifestyle choices, economic interests and cultural preferences. The creation of a market for learning has important implications. It reduces the public sphere because education is a legitimate object of public debate whereas the system of lifelong learning is aligned with a discourse of consumer choice. The moral and political questions about society that education should contribute to are ruled off the agenda in this process. Markets do not simply empower the learner as ‘consumer’. This view assumes markets are free, neutral and passive; the reality is they are structured by powerful interests, serve to reinforce them and are active in this process of construction. Rather than minimizing social controls the market achieves the same but in a different way. Ranson puts the point forcefully: The market is formally neutral but substantively interested. Individuals (or institutions) come together in competitive exchange to acquire possession of scarce goods and services. Within the marketplace all are free and equal, only differentiated by the capacity to calculate their self-interest. Yet of course the market masks its social bias. It elides but also reproduces the inequalities which consumers bring to the marketplace. Under the guise of neutrality, the institution of the market actively confirms and reproduces the pre-existing social order of wealth, privilege and prejudice. (1992: 72) Whilst lifelong learning may seem to free people up, it does so at the expense of a more collective conception of society (Edwards 2000). As Marx might have said, ‘consumers make choices but not always in circumstances of their own choosing’. The process of marketization also reduces the role of the educator in the learning


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process and increases their responsibility for its administration and management. On the one hand, the educator’s involvement in the curriculum is simplified to that of a facilitator of the learning process. On the other, they are being driven towards managing accreditation and certification of learning because of its perceived significance in securing employment and because it attracts resources. In order to avoid becoming the supernumerary of the economic order, individuals are in competition with each other to acquire more and more proof (certificates of educational attainment) of their learning commitment. The seductive nature of lifelong learning is its recognition of learning beyond schooling. It is a mistake, however, to see it as aimed at the type of change for individuals and collectivities that inspired proponents of lifelong education. Running the two together simply muddies the waters and obscures the decisive shifts taking place in the politics of learning. Lifelong learning is shifting the responsibility for learning to individuals, undermining welfare, disguising the reduction of the democratic public sphere, and working on people as objects of policy to ensure their compliance with the brave new world of flexible capitalism.

‘Learning to learn’: making flexible workers In a high technology knowledge society . . . learners must become proactive and more autonomous, prepared to renew their knowledge continuously and to respond constructively to changing constellations of problems and contexts. (European Commission 1999, cited in Field 2000: 136) Flexible specialization demands new types of malleable workers, willing to train and retrain, to meet the changing demands of the labour process. The politics of control in the workplace, which was primarily a struggle between organized labour and capital, is being redrawn to include lifelong learning. In this ‘politics of learning’, the site of struggle is one of convincing people to see themselves as regular and responsible learners. They have to acquire new outlooks, attitudes and values that recognize the need to constantly update knowledge and skills. Creating the identity of active learners, particularly when it is not highly valued, is not an easy task as the literature on non-participation in adult education shows (see McGivney 2001). The importance of learning how to learn is that it seeks to instil a new identity for workers and citizens as active learners. Whilst ‘learning to learn’ underpins lifelong learning policy it has received little direct attention and, when it has done so, this has largely come from its advocates. ‘Learning to learn’ implies a body of knowledge and skills, primarily derived from the study of cognitive and metacognitive skills of learning that can help individuals better understand and process information more effectively (Cornford 2002). Skilled learners can, therefore, control the effort and efficacy of learning. There are at least two good reasons to be sceptical of this view. First, it implies that basic learning processes are controlled by the individual who can, through ‘skill, will and self-regulation’ (Cornford 2002: 359) improve their effectiveness. Learning is, however, closely connected with experiences such as class, gender and ‘race’ that are embedded in structural relations in society. Second, it depicts ‘empowerment’ as the neutral technical mastery of learning skills. It emphasizes learning as a form



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of efficient information processing occurring in the head rather than a process of interaction and understanding which occurs between people and their relations with the wider world. Another way of making sense of ‘learning-to-learn’ can be inferred from Foucault’s analysis of power. He identifies a new ‘economy of power’, more humane and effective because it does not rely on coercion: ‘that is to say, procedures which allowed the effects of power to circulate in a manner at once continuous, uninterrupted, adapted and “individualized” throughout the entire social body’ (Foucault 1985: 91). It is useful to see Foucault’s analysis of power in terms of ‘disciplinary power’ and ‘pastoral power’ (Edwards 1997). By the former he means various practices used by the state to gain knowledge of people in order to position them and regulate their behaviour. By the latter he refers to confessional practices in which the self is constituted as the object for self-regulation. Disciplinary power works on the individual from the outside whereas pastoral power works from the inside by individuals internalizing desired patterns of behaviour. In this sense, people become agents of their own self-surveillance by adjusting and adapting what they do. Self-discipline more readily implies that class exploitation and oppression have been replaced with opportunity, freedom and job satisfaction because it lacks the element of compulsion. In the industrial phase of capitalism, according to Marx, the worker was a mere ‘appendage to the machine’ and unemployment and low wages the means of disciplining workers. However, this metaphor was also misleading as to the real type of work ethic capitalism required. Max Weber’s ‘protestant ethic’ was closer because it captured the sense of commitment, delayed gratification and disciplined use of time that capitalism thrived on. This no longer fits the new capitalism. As Coffield suggests ‘from an employer’s perspective, the ideal “portfolio” workers of the future are those who quickly internalize the need for employability, who willingly pay for their own continuous learning and who flexibly offer genuine commitment to each job, no matter how short its duration or how depressing its quality. There is more chance of Scotland winning the World Cup’ (2002: 185–186). To attempt to ‘square this circle’, lifelong learning is part of a hegemonic project to internalize compliance. Gramsci’s (1971) insight that ‘all relationships of hegemony are educational relationships’ is a useful reminder that what people learn is the ‘common sense’ of a particular distribution of power. The redundancy of knowledge and skills is constructed as a natural process with only one reasonable response—learn and relearn. Thus, ‘learning to learn’ encourages the individual to act responsibly in relation to this. In a situation of endemic insecurity, only the willingness to retrain offers a measure of control and purchase on events. It can quite easily seem, therefore, that even if new knowledge and skills are not empowering or emancipating that ‘it is its absolute precondition’ (Field 2000: ix). But what knowledge and what skills create this precondition? Are the skills for flexible specialization and the underlying attitudes, values and responsibilities that go with them ideologically neutral? If we fail to address the hidden curriculum of lifelong learning are we simply sucked into its politics? A politics that, in the current neoliberal agenda, is about undermining collective organization and action that historically informed workers’ reactions to insecurity. Instead of learning the importance of this, lifelong learning is constructing security and control as an individual cognitive propensity and responsibility.

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Flexibility strips away the role of work in character formation and lifelong learning sanitises this process to present it as an ‘opportunity’. Learning to learn is part of the process of instilling self-discipline to turn the ‘opportunity’ into the semblance of a reality. It also reaffirms it as an individual responsibility and not that of the enterprise or the state.


Disciplinary sanctions: prisoners of lifelong learning? Penalties and sanctions reinforce the ‘regime of truth’ that lifelong learning rather than collective organization is the route to security. As Field points out, ‘without anyone much noticing a great deal of professional development and skills updating is carried out not because anyone wants to learn or is ready to learn, but because they are required to learn’ (1999: 11). For example, the UK government would like to encourage a ‘learning culture’ (see DfEE 1998) in which individuals see learning as normal and routine behaviour. In the area of adult literacy, for example, adults with low skills are seen as poorly motivated and failing to address their learning needs. Training allowances for job seekers, prisoner parole schemes, personnel in the military and public sector workers are all identified as areas where more inducements and coercive expectations (e.g. cutting allowances for trainees) are to be introduced to motivate adults and induce them to undertake courses of learning (see David Blunket, former UK Minister for Employment and Education Skills for Life, speaking on World Book Day, March 2001). Increasingly, participation in lifelong learning is less of an option and more of a requirement and expectation. As Tight (1998) notes, embedding lifelong learning in work has facilitated the part compulsion plays in its development. Moreover, support for this is on the increase and from some unlikely quarters too: I find to my surprise that I have been thinking about compulsory adult learning . . . In the information industries continuing learning is a necessary precondition to keeping a job, and your capacity to keep on learning may affect the job security of others. Learning is becoming compulsory. And if it is true for people in some sectors of industry, why not for people who might want to rejoin the labour force later? (Alan Tuckett, Director of the National Institute for Adult Continuing Education, cited in Coffield 2002: 186) One of the fundamental distinctions between adult education and the education of children is that the former is voluntarily undertaken whereas schooling is compulsory. In the context of lifelong learning, this relationship is markedly changing. Of course, adults undertake courses of study of their own volition and young people have to go to school. However, this dichotomy disguises a more complex reality. There is a growing coercive expectation and demand that adults should participate in specific areas of learning. Whilst the main emphasis is on learning for work it might also include asylum seekers being required to learn the language and culture of the host country, or the loss of welfare benefits for individuals refusing to participate in literacy training. Lifelong learning, for some, may be an unwelcome sentence!


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‘Community’ and resistance Sennett argues that one contradiction of flexibility is that people inevitably seek more enduring narratives and these are more likely to be found where people live, in communities, rather than in the transitory nature of work. The ambivalence of ‘community’ has, nevertheless, to be recognised before it can be a ‘resource for hope’ (Williams 1989). If community is to be understood as a potential source of resistance, we need at least to make the distinction between ‘community as policy’ and ‘community as politics’ (Shaw and Martin 2000). The former refers to the increasing emphasis in policy to incorporate community into the implementation of a top-down policy agenda. This is much more to do with the concentration of power rather than its dispersal. ‘Community as politics’, however, suggests an alternative source of values and ideas deriving from the experiences and concerns of people outside of the formal politics of the state. The danger is that ‘community as policy’ marginalizes ‘community as politics’ in that lifelong learning is aligned with dominant policy imperatives. In the UK, the public space of community is increasingly regulated by participatory mechanisms of governance that undermine the possibility for the cultural politics of communities to become a real resource for change. The theme of partnership is at the centre of the UK government’s vision of the modernized welfare state (Riddell and Tett 2001). It is a vision that sees service users playing a significant role in shaping the type of service they want and its mode of delivery. However, there is little evidence that it is a genuine process of empowering people (Mayo 1997, Mordaunt 2001). Instead, community as policy is tied to a re-moralizing agenda that seeks to redefine public issues back into personal troubles. Lifelong learning gives a new twist to the familiar strategy of ‘blaming the victim’. This is a strategy that is generally easier to justify and cheaper to address. The history of community work, for example, is replete with examples of communities used to endorse and legitimate top-down policy initiatives that do little to make any genuine difference to people’s lives (Shaw 2003). Social partnerships can be seen as a species of corporatism pursued to compromise sectional interests (Meade and O’Donovan 2002). In the 1970s, in the UK, for example, both government and trade unions signed up to social contracts in order to achieve broad agreed goals. Corporatism was a way of sharing power, but also reinforcing central controls. The government permitted unions some influence over policy development in return for limiting their demands. In the current context, corporatism in the UK has changed in at least three clear ways. First, it is between the state and a variety of voluntary bodies (many with an interest in education and learning) whereas organized labour in trade unions is marginal. The new partners are less organized and less powerful than the state. Second, they have few other options to pursue. They have less resources and are reliant on the partnerships for survival and therefore less able to take an independent position. Whilst involvement may offer some moderate influence over policy making and implementation, the voluntary sector are mainly there to implement policy. Third, social partnerships are set in the context of short-term policy interventions measured against government targets and plans. This encourages a competitive localism in the scrabble for scarce resources and the ‘moving of the goalpost’ away from practical engagement with substantive issues into a continual process of applying for short-term funding.

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Lifelong learning in the above context reinforces the myth that local knowledge is harnessed to identify problems and define solutions. It subtly but persistently reinforces a deficit discourse of personal responsibility for failure. Moreover, groups and communities outside partnerships are further marginalized and their voices unheard. As Thompson points out in relation to the UK government’s national strategy for neighbourhood renewal that the ‘focus on the deficiencies of individuals and minority groups, however, well intentioned, distracts attention away from the structural, social, political and economic circumstances and trends, which give rise to social inequalities and which are largely outside of the control of those who live in poor communities’ (2000: 33). Meanwhile, the state creates a fiction for itself as a neutral partner, merely providing opportunities and choices for communities to resolve their problems by themselves.

Conclusion: educating our way out People are squeezed in the vice of a powerful economic system with consequences for their sense of belonging, relations with others and long term mutual commitments as capitalism seeks constantly to relocate, reshape and reinvent itself. The insecurity it produces undermines ambition for change ‘by making the whole future uncertain, it prevents all rational anticipation and, in particular, the basic belief and hope in the future that one needs in order to rebel, especially collectively, against present conditions, even the most intolerable’ (Bourdieu 1998: 82). Lifelong learning is part of this problem, rather than part of its solution. As Martin (2001) points out, lifelong learning is an inherently vacuous term but if it is to be worthwhile it should be about learning for living as distinct from merely learning for a living. If this is the purpose it will require making connections between the private lives of individuals and their public lives as citizens. It will also require a curriculum for social change that creates the opportunity for voice, dialogue and dissent in the public sphere. That is, education plays a pivotal role in a genuine civil society in which common ground between people—and their differences—are debated, understood and provide the basis for democratic action based on principles of equality and social justice. In this view, education should be both a resource and stimulus for individuals and collectivities to take some control, over their personal and collective circumstances (see Crowther et al. 1999). Instead of more lifelong learning, people need to acquire a clear sense of how education can help them make sense of their world and change it for the better. This has always been the ground for a social purpose ‘adult education of engagement’ (Jackson 1995). The contradictions of the current context create some opportunities in this respect. The state’s crisis of legitimacy is a process and the struggle over welfare is a key issue. ‘Community as policy’ and ‘community as politics’ may offer opportunities for a form of dialectical engagement that seeks to challenge top-down construction of problems and their solutions. Indeed, the crisis of legitimacy is also recognized and reflected in the importance attached to citizenship and democracy in the current policy context. These areas may provide the potential for a critical adult education agenda to develop. In this sense, adult and community workers will need to work in and against current versions of lifelong learning.


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Acknowledgements Thanks to my colleagues Ian Martin, Mae Shaw and Lyn Tett for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.


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