Lifelong Learning and the Contribution of Informal Learning

Abstract

The burgeoning interest in lifelong learning during the 1990s has been influenced strongly by the scope and significance of the 1970s debate about lifelong education. This debate identified and clarified a continuum of understandings of the lifelong education concept. At one end of the continuum, a minimalist view of lifelong education envisaged a society in which there would be reasonably adequate provision of adult education for all of those who chose to patronise it. Arguably, there is already consensus about the desirability of a minimalist view of lifelong education, and, perhaps, many present industrialised countries are close to exemplifying it. However, many proponents of lifelong education were seeking much more than this. The other end of the continuum, a maximalist view of lifelong education, sought nothing less than a learning society. While learning societies can take various forms, proponents of lifelong education typically favoured one that was democratic, where the learning society was “a shared, pluralistic and participatory ‘form of life’ in Dewey’s sense... rather than a simple set of institutions and constitutional guarantees” (Wain 1987, p. 202; Wain 1993, p.68). Certainly such a learning society is yet to be realised. Nor is there any sign of consensus about the desirability of this maximalist view of lifelong education.