Lifelong Learning, Training and Education in Globalized Economic Systems: Analysis and Perspectives

Throughout the world, countries agree that lifelong learning, training and education is crucial to cope today's issues and challenges involving societies, cultures, economics, and health, well-being and development too, especially in a difficult time of global crisis, as the current one is still. Global economics and societies, involved in faster and faster changes, require higher and higher competencies, skills and knowledge. “The ability to produce and use knowledge has become a major factor in development” (World Bank, 2009). Improved people will be able to compete in global markets but they will be able to cooperate actively as memberships of societies and/or communities. So, lifelong learning, training and education will be key to contribute to increase social cohesion, reduce crime, and improve income distribution and to contribute to the growth of economic, scientific and cultural knowledge too. So, there's a growing need to lifelong and lifewide widespreadly update people's knowledge, competences and skills. The aim of this paper is to analyze the context of nowadays globalized economies and societies, to pick out data, issues and needs, to draw attention on all those aspects for stressing pedagogical and political debate. Analyses are deepened with a systemic-relational approach and hermeneutic, heuristic and critical method. International indicators, such as by OECD or EU data, may offer a comparative framework for analysis, useful for education policies, pedagogists and educational researchers to improve extent and quality in the educational offer and to contribute to increase development and well-being of people.