Lifelong Learning: Concepts and Contexts

Lifelong learning" gained currency when it was adopted by UNESCO in the 1970s as a promise of access to learning for adults who, because of poverty, life circumstances, and national underdevelopment, were unable to benefit from initial-stage educational opportunities. Conceptualized as a means to deliver individual, family, and social development, by the 1980s this ambition was set aside in favour of a dominant discourse of lifelong learning that centred on job training and re-skilling for flexibility in the new knowledge economy.