‘Framing’ Lifelong Learning in the Twenty-First Century: Towards a Way of Thinking

Abstract

Two contrasting ‘humanist’ and inter-related forms of discourse of lifelong learning are evident in the literature: the first, dominated by politicians and employers, appears to interpret lifelong learning as a means to improve competitiveness and productivity regarding what is done in practice within a global economy; the other, led mainly by academics, are represented as the very means to continually resolve the conflicts and contradictions posed by the first. In this chapter we draw on a ‘way of thinking’ that is deconstructive in its intent that attempts to move beyond the confines of ‘humanist thinking’. Such thinking makes clear the vicious circularity of the argument for the improvement of ourselves as human beings, wherein lifelong learning valorised by leaders in discourses of lifelong learning provides not only a rationalisation for our improvement but the very means of achieving such possibilities. On reading Heidegger’s ‘. . . Question Concerning Technology’ and its closely related text, ‘The Principle of Reason’, we sought to stand outside systematic attempts to represent this vicious circle of improvement. In so doing this chapter explores such a vicious circle in its relationship with Being, in which such meansends driven technology of lifelong learning, rather than continuing to reproduce the illusion of something under our control and at our disposal, only reveals the real to us as human beings in accordance with the principles of reason, and of lifelong learning. As grounds for the ‘framing’, such principles, it is argued, rank and order the ‘on-going activity’ of perfecting and making sufficient the objective self, ‘the learner’ for the global economy, rather than opening the possibility of the identity of human beings belonging together with the movement of difference. So, it would appear that the improvement of, and education of, ourselves as human beings in and through lifelong learning, which, in becoming normative and binding for practices on grounds of the principle of lifelong learning, renders agents of education as functionaries of ‘the framing’.