L'educazione nell'ottica della continuità

Abstract

After a brief analysis of the tradition of life long learning aimed to highlight its ancient origins and fundamental theoretical basis, the author focuses on the pedagogic and cultural debate which has brought to the actual configuration of life long learning, both at a national and at an international level. By referring to history, a strict relationship between adults education and life long learning is proven; while in the past theses two fields were perceived as antagonistic and separated, nowadays (especially starting from the last 20 years) they have become complementary and cooperative. In particular, this has been achieved thanks to the introduction in the educational processes of the category of the stream of life, which pertains to life long learning. Two are the main aims of this essay which is structured into two main levels mutually interacting: the first level, which is mainly explanatory, intends to overcome the self-evidence of many hypothesis and activities in the field of life long education; the second level, mainly propositional, tends to enrich the concepts and the operative meaning of life long learning, which, in the pedagogical field, is not acknowledged as a separated discipline, but as a way of interpreting education itself. The two levels are examined by the author in the light of a phenomenological pedagogy, aslife long education seems to share manifold fundamental suppositions with this field; among them, we can count the centrality of the individual, the holistic idea of education, and the open dialogue with other sciences and types of knowledge.