Abstract
The aim of this study is to present an alternative approach to lifelong learning that contradicts the prevailing political rhetoric and highlights the role of lifelong learning as a mechanism to subjugate and control subjects, with the aim of increasing the profitability of companies and employers. Particular attention is paid to the ideological content of the concept of lifelong learning, to the way in which lifelong learning functions as a form of biopower, and to its connection with the emergence of a new ‘dangerous' class of the precariat.
TopThe Meaning Of Lifelong Learning In A Neoliberal Hegemony
UNESCO (1984 cited in International Labour Organization 2019, p.7) defined as “all learning activity undertaken throughout life, with the aim of improving knowledge, skills and/or qualifications for personal, social and/or professional reasons.” Similar approaches followed by the European Commission (2001) who defined lifelong learning as “all learning activities in which people participate throughout their lives with the aim of improving their knowledge, skills and qualifications in their personal, social, civic and professional lives” (p. 1). For International Labour Organization (2019) lifelong learning is “all learning activities undertaken throughout life for the development of competencies and qualifications” (p. 7). In addition, CEDEFOP (2008) stressed that lifelong learning is “all learning activity undertaken throughout life, which results in improving knowledge, know-how, skills, competences and/or qualifications for personal, social and/or professional reasons” (p. 123).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Lifelong Learning: All learning activity undertaken throughout life, with the aim of improving knowledge, skills/competences and/or qualifications for personal, social and/or professional reasons.
4th Industrial Revolution: Started at the turn of the century and is dominated by the digital revolution. It is not just about intelligent and connected machines, but a much larger scope. It is about the merging of these technologies and their interaction across the physical, digital, and biological domains that make this revolution completely different from previous industrial revolutions.
Governmentality: The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target populations, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security.
Biopower: A power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.
Reference Group Theory: A general conceptual framework that assumes that individuals' attitudes, values, and self-appraisals are shaped, in part, by their identification with, and comparison to, reference groups.
Precariat: The precariat is made up of subjects who live in precarious employment relationships with periods of unemployment or withdrawal from the labour force and who live in uncertainty.
Social Control: Is the study of the mechanisms, in the form of patterns of pressure, through which society maintains social order and cohesion. These mechanisms establish and enforce a standard of behavior for members of a society and include a variety of components, such as shame, coercion, force, restraint, and persuasion.
Performativity: Is defined as a technology, culture, and normative function that involves judgments and comparisons and appears as a means of control and change. Thus, the performance of subtexts serves as a unit for measuring their productivity.
Biopolitics: Is a technique of biopower that operates through “the regulatory control and series of interventions deployed in order to supervise the mechanics of life.