Dealing with difference by creating dependency? A critique of the dependency thesis in lifelong learning and adult education
Richard G. Bagnall. Griffith University, Australia
Paper presented at the 35th Annual SCUTREA Conference July 5-July 7 2005, University of Sussex, England, UK
An attributed response to difference in adult education has been seen to be the creation of a general dependency among learners, thereby reducing both learner diversity and the need for diversity in the provision of educational opportunities. Acknowledging, here, the adult education origins of lifelong learning theory and the central location of contemporary adult education practice in the lifelong learning movement, I am focusing critical attention on a strand of lifelong learning scholarship that presents the lifelong learning movement as engendering learner dependency. This position I term here the ‘lifelong-learning-as-lifelong-dependency thesis’ (or, more simply, the ‘dependency thesis’), since it presents the lifelong learning movement as being hegemonically exploitative, engendering a deficit discourse of constraining regulation through which individuals and cultural identities develop self-constructs of inadequacy and dependency requiring remediation through lifelong learning.
My purpose in this paper is to look critically at the dependency thesis. This I do by firstly outlining what I understand to be the main arguments of the thesis. I then look critically at what is being assumed and presented through those arguments in an effort to place them in a broader cultural context from which we may understand the import of the thesis itself.
For the purposes of this analysis, I am treating the terms ‘liberation’ and ‘emancipation’ (and their variants) as interchangeable. Similarly, the notion of generating dependency articulated in the dependency thesis I am treating as a form of enslaving through limiting or constraining options.
The Dependency Thesis
The dependency thesis has been articulated most comprehensively by Crowther (2004). It has also been advanced or included as part of the argument in a number of other works, including those of Ohliger (1974) and Wilson (1999). It is on these works that I am drawing in this description.
Three interrelated arguments may be recognised in the dependency thesis – what I am terming here the ‘privatisation’, the ‘codification’, and the ‘discontinuity’ arguments. These arguments cohere in constructing dependency as pervading sectoral discourses and as constraining and being internalised by individuals as part of their individual identities and cultural realities.
The privatisation argument is at the heart of the dependency thesis. It sees lifelong learning discourse as being complicit in the capitalist, neo-liberal agenda of corporatising learning. In that agenda, citizens are re-defined as private consumers of learning opportunities in the lifelong learning marketplace, rather than as political actors in the public arena. Learning is made a requirement of successful participation in work and leisure and in access to social support and welfare. The de-differentiation of cultural institutions is seen as having led to the dispersal of learning and education throughout other institutions – including those of work, leisure and social welfare. The individualisation of learning in lifelong learning discourse is seen as placing responsibility for any learning failure on the learner and as reducing the role of the state for educational policy and provision. It is seen, in other words, as creating a deficit discourse of personal responsibility for learning, in which the ‘victim’ of learning failure is blamed for that failure. The flexible specialisation demanded of contemporary workers (which is an important driver of lifelong learning) is effectively a cover for what is the flexible exploitation of workers. Lifelong learning therein reveals a ‘hidden agenda of creating malleable, disconnected, transient, disciplined workers and citizens’ (Crowther 2004, 127). Educational policy is eschewed and replaced by a focus on strategies or techniques for facilitating learning. A culture of inadequacy is internalised by individuals as part of their individual identities, through what Edwards (1997) terms ‘pastoral power’ – using Foucault’s notion of ‘constitutive power’.
The codification argument is closely linked to the privatisation argument. It sees lifelong learning as leading to the externally codified regulation and compulsion of learning engagement and assessment, which itself engenders and reinforces identities and cultural realities of dependency. Codification is a form of ‘disciplinary power’ (Edwards 1997) used to coerce individuals into learning. Codified conditionals are used to make access to other cultural goods – such as welfare support, the right to continue professional practice, and avoidance of incarceration following a misdemeanour – dependent upon engagement in certain proscribed learning activities. Social relationships are seen as being increasingly regulated, through social contracts, partnerships, mutual obligation relationships and such like, undermining the potential of communities as contexts of radical education and cultural change.
The discontinuity argument underpins the first two. It sees an important discontinuity between lifelong education and lifelong learning discourse, such that the privatisation and codification arguments, while applying to lifelong learning discourse, do not apply to that of lifelong education. Drawing on Griffin (1999a & b) and Martin (2003), Crowther (2004) presents lifelong education discourse as historically a part of the progressive educational debate of the 1960s and 1970s. It is presented as being holistic and humanistic in nature, seeking lifelong education in the service of creating a society in which individuals would flourish through personal growth grounded in lifelong education, in and for the common good and through policies of social welfare. While acknowledging that the terms lifelong learning and lifelong education have been used interchangeably, Crowther (2004) argues that lifelong learning falsely acquired the progressive mantle of lifelong education. Lifelong learning, rather, should be understood as ‘a mode of power…aimed at reproducing wider inequalities’ (Crowther 2004, p. 128).
Critique of the Dependency Thesis
Perhaps the first point that should be made clear in response to the foregoing arguments is that lifelong learning theory – that body of normative scholarship directed to explicating the programmatic nature of lifelong learning – presents lifelong learning overwhelmingly as emancipatory (Bagnall 2001). Lifelong learning and lifelong education theory are both grounded strongly in progressive education philosophy – a normative philosophical movement that sought to engender liberal democratic values in education through radical educational reform. Drawing on that philosophical tradition, modern lifelong education and learning theory sought to reform education in directions that took it away from what were seen as the illiberal, non-progressive and undemocratic aspects of contemporary educational policy, provision and engagement. Those counter-emancipatory aspects were seen importantly as including the following (in no particular order here): (1) a focus on educational provision, rather than on learning engagement; (2) a concern with the taught curriculum, rather than with learning outcomes; (3) a focus on the learning of content, rather than on learning how to manage one’s own learning; (4) a preoccupation with education for children and youth, rather than throughout life; (5) a pre-occupation with constraining and policing learning; (6) a structure of learning assessment that progressively excluded students from access to further education on the grounds of their having reached the limits of their educational potential; (7) approaches to learning assessment and credentialing that saw learning assessment and credentialing as inseparable from educational engagement; (8) a hierarchy of segregated types of knowledge and learning; in which the most highly valued knowledge was propositional; (9) the differentiation of education from other cultural institutions and realities; (10) a focus on societal learning needs, rather than those of the students; (11) a presumption that students may best be taught as members of idealised developmental categories, rather than as individuals; and (12) educational systems and approaches that were framed by tradition, ideology and policy, rather than by empirical experience.
In response to these counter-emancipatory tendencies of traditional education, lifelong education theory, building upon a pragmatic and progressive philosophical foundation, sought, inter alia (and paralelling the foregoing list), to focus educational attention on: (1) the learning engagement; (2) learning outcomes; (3) learning capabilities for managing one’s own learning (4) learning throughout life; (5) the facilitation of learning; (6) educational inclusion and re-engagement on an as-needs basis; (7) the separation of learning from its assessment and credentialing; (8) practical knowledge and learning; (9) the embedding of learning in other life tasks and events; (10) individual learning needs; (11) the individual learner in his or her cultural context; and (12) empirical experience, practical utility and secular knowledge in the framing of educational interventions.
That progressive emancipatory responsiveness of lifelong education theory has been argued elsewhere as being captured in a number of common dimensions (Bagnall 2004). One of the crucial thrusts of these common dimensions is the recognition that knowledge is socially constructed and that learning is culturally embedded. Knowledge and learning, in other words, are constrained by the cultural constructs in which they are generated, interpreted and made meaningful. They are meaningful in virtue of that embeddedness and they are limited by it. Any learning that is liberating from cultural constraints (including that from ignorance and from ‘false consciousness’) is thus simultaneously and irreducibly constraining. Whether our learning serves to deepen our knowledge within existing knowledge frameworks or discourses, or whether it takes us into existentially new frameworks or discourses, it unavoidably deepens our dependence on that or those frameworks or discourses. Any educational theory, movement or program – insofar as it is influential and to the extent that it is so – may thus rightly be accused of leading to the creation of dependency relationships.
While certainly not all knowledge and learning is equally constraining, all knowledge and learning is constraining to some extent. Emancipation through learning is a relative matter – relative, not just to empirical reality, but also to the frameworks of meaning in which it is understood. The relative potential of social welfare and neo-liberal knowledge frameworks to create dependency is a point of difference between those frameworks, since they understand and construct emancipatory potential somewhat differently and in such a way as to favour their own particular construction in each case. Perhaps the most singular omission from articulations of the dependency thesis is thus the recognition that all learning is both liberating and enslaving, both diminishing of dependency and enhancing of it. The dependency thesis of lifelong learning theory thus misses the point and, in so doing, misrepresents lifelong learning theory as somehow failing through its generation of learned dependency.
That progressive emancipatory responsiveness of lifelong education theory is also captured in what I have argued elsewhere is its presupposition of an aretaic ethic with a teleology of optimising universal human flourishing through learning. In that ethic, individuals, cultural identities and ethical action are seen as being characterised by a particular set of informed commitments or virtues. The informed commitments involved here are particularly those of – commitment to constructive engagement in learning, to oneself and one’s cultural inheritance, to others and their cultural differences, to the human condition and its potential for progress, to practical reason and its contribution to bettering the human condition, to social structures that give persons control over their own destinies, to social justice, to the non-violent resolution of conflicts and to sustainable cultural conditions.
These informed commitments are overwhelmingly progressive and social-democratic. They are internalised values impelling human action towards humane achievement and liberation, within a social context, for the greater good. They cannot sensibly be construed as indicating a developmental disadvantage of the sort argued by proponents of the inadequacy thesis. They are taken as goods in themselves – as qualities that define what it is to be a good person, organisation, community, city, society or other social entity – and as interdependent instrumental means to the end of attaining and sustaining the good individual or social entity. And they indicate, derivatively, what it is to do the right thing.
The ethic that they imply also involves a recognition of the contextualised nature of human action, focusing strongly on ethical sensitivity and responsiveness to individual, collective and situational differences. They involve a recognition also of ethical knowledge as progressive – developmental throughout and across life’s situations, and potentially into what we would consider to be ethical expertise. The extent to which ethical knowledge is evidenced in action is seen as a variable matter of degree (as well as of kind). Ethical action is understood as a situated outcome of what a good person is and aspires to be (or of what a good society, etc. is and aspires to be). Ethical action is thus both evaluated and justified on that basis. So conceptualised, ethical knowledge is seen as being knowable – learned – primarily through contextualised guided practice and critical reflection on that practice and through the modelling of good practice (Dreyfus, Dreyfus & Athanasiou 1986).
While the informed commitments underpin both traditional lifelong education and its lifelong learning successor, they will inevitably (and properly) be given different emphases and different particular expressions in different cultural contexts. Only at the most general levels of policy articulation (especially at the global level – expressed in this case in the policy directives of the UNESCO) are they at all likely to be accorded a balanced response and a generality of expression that is a recognisable mirror of the informing normative theory. Even then, though, the policy response will be constrained by the dominant contemporary cultural context of the body. Lifelong learning theory, in so far as it is taken up in policy and practice, will inevitably thus be selective and in different ways and to different degrees in different contexts. The contemporary cultural context will inevitably constrain the form and extent of its adoption. The neo-liberal dominance of the contemporary cultural formation will inevitably give neo-liberal values dominant expression in educational or other initiatives that are influenced by lifelong learning theory. While this represents a (paradigmatic?) shift away from social welfare to neo-liberal values, it represents also a shift in the nature of learned dependencies – inviting selective attention, from a traditional critical perspective, to the new dependencies.
Nevertheless, the points of compatibility between lifelong learning and neo-liberal values should be acknowledged here, including their shared commitment to individualising learning and responsibility, individual freedom and rights, recognising prior learning, prioritising practical (including vocational) learning, responsiveness to practical contingencies, and focusing on learning outcomes. Those shared commitments have undoubtedly made it easier for neo-liberal agendas to adopt and adapt lifelong learning theory to their own ends. The rejection of lifelong learning theory on the grounds of its incorporation into neo-liberal educational reforms remains, though, a serious misjudgement, and one that is evident in the dependency thesis.