Secondary Education as a phase in Life‐Long Education

Abstract

Life-long education has long been an ideal envisioned by educationalists on ceremonial occasions. As long as it remained that and no more, or as long as it was a pious exhortation to the individual to pursue learning to the best of his ability individually throughout the course of his individual life, it was not necessary for educational planners to take it seriously. In the last decade it has ceased to be an ideal and become, not a reality, but at least a potential reality. This means that it is necessary for educational planners, if they are really planning for the future, to begin to take it seriously. It means also that the concept of life-long education has entered into a dangerous phase which affects all educational concepts at this stage in their development, when, for the first time a purely visionary ideal is seen as a potential reality. The danger in this phase is that the excitement of seeing an ideal within measurable distance of being actualised may lead us to overleap in imagination the practical obstacles that still lie in our way, and to concentrate on picturing the promised land as if we were already there, without a sufficiently practical consideration of the route by which we hope to arrive at it. Thus some people are excited while others are horrified by the vision presented in Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society. Few have considered with any practicality the process by which a society might arrive at that goal, or what would be involved in taking the first steps in that direction. If they had they might be less attracted by it. If the gradual development of life-long education, and it is bound, in practice, to be gradual, implies changes in basic education, it is in the secondary stage that those changes will be needed most. This is not only because that will remain for most people the terminal stage of full time general education, but also because many of the appropriate changes in primary education are already taking place. Open education and the integrated day at the primary stage are clearly appropriate in the context of lifelong education and are already becoming accepted in some areas in their own right. Many of the reforms in tertiary education are in line with the possibility of life-long education. But it is in the secondary school, and particularly in the second cycle that the block forms and that so many of our children are finally turned against education. It used to be in the first cycle, but is now extending to the second. It is probably a reasonable assumption that within the next decade the normal age of entry into employment in the more economically developed areas of Europe will rise to 17. With the earlier maturity of young people it is not inconceivable, and would perhaps be very advantageous, if this were to coincide with the age of entry to tertiary education, or in those countries which still retain it, to military training. And I must make clear here that what I refer to is military training and not military service. This would at least eliminate a gap which at present provides one of Europe's most familiar educational problems. Moreover there is considerable reason to