EDUCATION FOR THE GOOD SOCIETY - Support

1 The Learning Age: A Renaissancefor a New Britain, Cm 3790, TheStationery Office, 1998.2 Tom Schuller and DavidWatson, Learning Through Life:Inquiry into the Future for LifelongLearning, NIACE, 2009.9. Lifelong learning:chimera, head-nodderor awkward customer?Tom SchullerLibrarians are rumoured, entirely unfairly, to befond of saying ‘which part of “no” is it that youdon’t understand?’. Sometimes I feel the sameway when I’m asked about lifelong learning.After all, the words which make up the term areall part of day-to-day discourse. But that is beingunfair to the questioner, since it remains truethat lifelong learning is still a concept which is farfrom clearly defined and understood.An alternative, equally common, response,is a sympathetic but slightly impatient nod: yesyes, of course we all agree lifelong learning is aGood Thing, but let’s get on to the issues thatreally have a grip on the political imagination:school selection, or higher education funding.Again, this is an understandable reaction, as theseare indeed the items that are foremost in manyfamilies’ minds, and therefore in the ruminationsof politicians.These are just two of the reasons why it isso hard to get a solid debate going on lifelonglearning. Another is the perennial difficulty oftackling an issue that spans sectoral boundaries:not just several educational sectors, not justeducation and training, but these plus health,social care, community development and so on.I’m not going here to do the job of definitiveclarification, nor offer the compelling rationalefor lifelong learning. The acknowledged sourcefor this is David Blunkett’s foreword to the 1998green paper The Learning Age, a (sadly typical)example of the unfulfilled promise held out byearly New Labour. 1 Instead I want to address thepolitics of lifelong learning in quite a pragmaticway but raising, I hope, some awkward questions,which political rhetoric on its own will not beenough to deal with.However, just to be clear about the scope oflifelong learning as I understand it, I’m stickingwith the approach we used in Learning ThroughLife, the main report of the Inquiry into theFuture of Lifelong Learning:Lifelong learning includes people of all ageslearning in a variety of contexts – in educationalinstitutions, at work, at home and through leisureactivities. It focuses mainly on adults returningto organised learning rather than on the initialperiod of education or on incidental learning. 2Some of the awkward issues for me about thepolitics of the issue are:• What is the nature of the educational contractbetween generations?• What is the desired balance between marketand non-market provision?• How do we reconcile personal aspirationsand preferences with education’s role as apromoter of social cohesion?By ‘awkward’ I mean politically challengingissues on which people who share similar valuesmay well disagree.Intergenerational justice andeducational effectivenessIn Learning Through Life we show the grossimbalance in the way public and private expenditureon education is weighted towards theyoungest adult age group. We defined this as18–25, the other three groups being 25–50, 50–75and 75+ (for the social and epidemiologicalrationale for these divisions, see www.niace.org.uk/lifelonglearninginquiry). We estimated thetotal to be of the order of £55 billion annually; 86per cent of this goes to the first age group, 12 percent to the second, with trivial amounts to theThird Age and virtually nothing to the FourthAge. There is now a window of opportunity,with the demographic decline in the numbersof young people, to achieve a rebalancing acrossage groups without this resulting in per capitareduction in expenditure on young people. Thatproposition, of course, looks implausible in thelight of the furore over student finance. Reducingstill further the public investment in youngpeople would not immediately recommend itselfto anyone just now. Yet the argument remains.What we need is a serious debate on educationas part of the intergenerational contract. Thebooks by Ed Howker and Shiv Malik (Jilted44 | www.compassonline.org.uk