A Critical Look at Lifelong Learning.

Abstract

Education, which is a fundamental right of human being, has been transformed into a kind of lifelong prisoning by marketing step by step under the name of lifelong learning. Adult education as one of the most crucial parts of the educational system has also been affected by the global trend of an international actor, the European Union through its lifelong learning approach discoursed in EU official documents correspondingly to globalization and tried to be converted to adult learning instead. Therefore, globalization is a primary factor that formalizes this context with the support of creating marketing systems in which the capital plays its magnificent role to reconstruct social organization and so of capitalism in a global scale as integrated with its institutions by eliminating social state praxis. Then, it starts to regard education as profitable and appetitive sector to ensure the success of knowledge-based global economy of the 21st century. Hence, this study is aimed for a look to lifelong learning approach of EU with a critical eye by signifying how it is being shaped by global marketing policies in the name of emancipation of the individual. Key words: Lifelong learning, adult education, globalization, knowledge society.