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This essay focuses on contemporary lifelong learning discourse as it was reflected in deliberations during three events held in Australia, Canada and the UK during 2000-01. Through the dialogical lenses of these Y2K events that brought together an array of international participants, it examines lifelong learning as a chameleonic concept and versatile practice in education and culture. It consider how participants at the three events framed lifelong learning’s parameters and complexities as they discussed perspectives and trends shaping lifelong learning discourse, policy making and practice. In doing so, three pervasive Y2K-event themes are discussed: (a) lifelong learning encompasses instrumental, social and cultural education; (b) lifelong learning involves mediation of public and private responsibilities; and (c) lifelong learning occupies a precarious and paradoxical position in a world that desires to position it as a permanent global necessity. The essay concludes with a perspective on lifelong learning as a critical practice in a world where culture as knowledge and culture as community vie for space. It locates this practice in inclusive, holistic terms, suggesting that a critical practice of lifelong learning is guided by a key aim: to help persons become responsive and responsible citizen learners and workers who are able to think, speak and act in life, learning and work situations.

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In Canada, current federal learning-and-work policy is focused on individual learner-worker development using an iteration of lifelong learning as cyclical. This policy aims to enhance the social as an effect of enhancing the economic. In this neoliberal milieu, cyclical lifelong learning has become not only a norm but also a culture and an attitude. Still, a current Canadian phenomenon indicates that increasing numbers of young adults are disengaging from participation in such learning that the federal government considers being a preventive measure. In discussing their withdrawal from what might perceived as cyclical lifelong learning for control, I consider a particularly challenging case: the predicament of young adults in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. To help us think about adequately addressing the dislocation they experience in life and work. I offer a Freire-informed vision of a critical social pedagogy of learning and work. This pedagogy calls for re-engendering the social in lifelong learning by revitalising critical social concerns with historical awareness, hope, possibility, ethics, justice, democratic vision, learner freedom, critique and intervention.

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This article provides a critical sociological analysis of trends and perspectives pervasive during the emergence of North American adult education (1919-1970). In discussing transitions during the first 50 years of what is considered modern practice, it draws on Webster E. Cotton's (1986, On Behalf of Adult Education: A Historical Examination of the Supporting Literature. Boston, MA: Center for the Study of Liberal Education for Adults) periodization model - modified a few years later - to organize people, politics, and ideas as categories shaping North American adult education. In exploring this complexity, the article reflects on the perennial difficulty of answering the question 'What is adult education?'

Following brief considerations of periods one (1919-1929) and two (1930-1946) in the field's emergence, the article focuses on period three (1947-1970) in more detail, providing critical perspectives on field expansion during the perceived corporate age of adult education. It considers how adult education and constituent higher adult education were each affected as the field of study and practice negotiated the knowledge-culture-language-power nexus where it sought presence and place. Then, comparing the historical example of post-World War II North American adult education and the contemporary example of lifelong learning in neoliberal times, the article concludes by considering how cultural change forces have placed educational formations into reactive modes over time and tides.

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This essay examines adult learning in Canada and USA (1945-1970) when educators hoped to establish academic adult education as a cultural force to help citizens negotiate their way amidst the rapid changes to life, learning and work in the postindustrial society. It focuses on the idea of lifelong learning and in particular it attempts to explicate a cultural politics of lifelong learning, which academic adult educators hoped would give the field a higher profile. The author considers two key factors: the problematic relationship between public education, for children, and adult education and how this interfered with a post-war turn to lifelong learning; and secondly, the shift in the meaning of social education. Andre Grace argues that the post-war discourse of democracy delimits the meaning of the social, locating it mainly within a concern with preserving the dominant culture and society. Show less