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This report is based on a research project undertaken by CEDEFOP, employing a Eurobarometer survey, which aimed to obtain innovative information about lifelong learning from the perspective of individuals themselves. This report provides a detailed analysis of the survey results, following the 2003 publication of an initial analysis (indexed at TD/TNC 74.360). The results obtained were divided into four major areas which form the structure of this report. The first examines citizens’ perceptions of the usefulness of a range of skills both ‘old’ and ‘new’, and whether they believe they possess these skills themselves; the second area questions where and how people feel they learn best, with a particular focus on work-based learning; section three discusses issues related to participation and intentions towards lifelong learning; and the fourth explores policy-relevant issues while comparing the collected data with results from previous Eurobarometer surveys. The results of the survey include: most citizens see traditional skills and social skills as very useful, and largely feel proficient in these; older citizens are more likely to feel less than proficient in all ‘new skills’ and see them as useless in their lives; there is a visible gendered skills gap in information technology (IT) and applied science areas; citizens who have experienced the practical usefulness of a given skill are more likely to recognise its usefulness; only a small number of survey participants would choose to learn in the future through open and distance learning methods; nearly all respondents who reported no interest in work-related learning had low levels of education; and respondents with high levels of education and high-status jobs are the most proactive learning citizens. Show less

This chapter looks at the types of changes that appear to be taking place in the social construction of the life course that impinge on the modalities of youth transitions and the kinds of flexibilities that are demanded of individuals and forms of social organisations in 'knowledge societies'. The author suggests that there is a social reconstruction of the youth phase in the making which will lead to a new balance between formal and nonformal credentials and at the same time to more polarisation of life chances in the systems of education and employment. She suggests establishing community-based and case-centred vocational and career counselling to give support and orientation to young people.

The monograph from which this chapter is taken is indexed at TD/TNC 65.371. Selected chapters from this book are indexed from TD/TNC 65.372 to TD/TNC 65.379. Show less

Changing boundaries between categories of knowledge, together with changing relations with propositional and experiential knowledge, demand reconsideration of what counts as learning. Such re-contextualisation processes can be approached from three standpoints: deconstruction-decoding (learning as a differentiated set of related practices), refocusing-repositioning (situating learning sites in a life-course perspective) and reconstruction-recoding (specifying pedagogic discourse to embrace non-formal and informal learning). Learning in second modernity might hold emancipatory promise, but this requires fundamental re-structuring of teaching/learning contexts in all respects, not least in the re-positioning of all learners as adults, in the sense of being autonomous and responsible shapers of their potentially highly differentiated learning biographies - but it equally heralds an intensification of discipline of the self.

Published abstract reprinted by permission of the copyright owner. Show less