Opening up the ideologies in “Learning: The Treasure Within”

A quarter of a century after the 1972 Faure Report, UNESCO’s International Commission on Education for the 21st Century launched a wide range of policy dialogues to recap the original idea of lifelong learning in the Faure Report. The result of these dialogues, “Learning: The Treasure Within” also known as the Delors Report, proposed updating UNESCO’s lifelong learning policy. Even though ideology is an inevitable social force that substantially conditions our epistemology on educational issues, still, little is known about the ideologies embedded in the Delors Report. With that in mind, this study, utilizing the concept of policy as discourse, reveals which ideological influences within the Delors Report have been marked as authoritative and which as marginal. Implications for lifelong learning policy are discussed.