Normative presumptions of the European Union’s adult education policy

Abstract

The European Union (EU) has significantly influenced the formation of European adult education policy in the last decade. By raising the importance and visibility of adult education, the EU has become an influential actor in the norm and standard setting for adult education and lifelong learning. However, as previous research has shown, the EU strengthens primarily the economic, instrumental and vocational perspectives of adult education and lifelong learning. We supplement this critique by analysing the values, normative presumptions and ideology of the EU’s adult education policy. We analysed the core official EU policy documents on adult learning in 2000–2016 using documentary analysis as well as the theoretical framework of the political sociology of adult education and postmodernism-related theories in education. Our findings indicate that the EU conceptualises adult education not as an independent policy field but as a form of ‘crisis knowledge’, which aims to solve a variety of social, economic and political problems. Moreover, the EU’s adult education policy functions with the typical ideology of modernity that generates old myths in today’s rather late modern European societies.