Lifelong learning: Between humanism and global capitalism

Abstract

The last 40 years have left us with two competing paradigms of lifelong learning, the UNESCO and OECD worldviews. UNESCO and OECD paradigms can be seen as the two halves of a Janus1 face that together express the ambiguous nature of lifelong learning (Rubenson, 2006). With UNESCO promoting a vague idea of a humanistic-inspired paradigm of lifelong learning, today’s national policy debates are almost exclusively driven by the OECD’s economistic paradigm of lifelong learning and with the European Union as its prophet. It is from this perspective that this chapter sets out to analyse how the OECD interpretation of lifelong learning became the taken-for-granted ‘rule of ideas’. This chapter also scrutinises the political project of lifelong learning and explores the possibilities for establishing a more balanced relationship between the two competing ideas of lifelong learning.