Lifelong Learning and Collective Experience

Lifelong Learning and Collective Experience

Henning Salling Olesen, Roskilde University, DK

Paper presented at SCUTREA, 29th Annual Conference, 5-7 July 1999, University of Warwick

Lifelong Learning in a New Dress

Once upon a time adult education was associated with political and idealistic struggle - now it seems to be accepted mainstream. Adult Education and lifelong learning have become political answers to most of the essential structural problems of the late modern capitalist industrial society - economically, socially and culturally. The idealistic, wishful thinking, that has for 3-4 decades been slowly worn down by the absence of practical implementation, now seems to be promoted by power elites in the capitalist world.

May be it is time to 're-charge’ the critical and democratic meaning of the concept? In attempting to do so from within a critical theory position, I also hope to enter into a clarifying dialogue with post modernists, who also orient themselves to lifelong learning for seemingly different reasons.

Lifelong learning has gained new vitality in a new context, as the key concept for socio-economic needs for mobilizing and adapting human resources, though work, economic growth and competition (Rubenson, 1996). The reasons for this approach are because of economic competitiveness, whether on national or on continental level (Europe versus North America versus Asia).

It may seem ironic, but it is also logical: The economy and work need human resources, and the fact that upskilling demands subjective involvement make lifelong learning a societal programme. The change in the rationales, and the fact that they are still separate, can be seen as characteristics of the role of education in the modernization process. On the one side a vehicle of a humanistic political programme for social autonomy and ‘empowerment’, and on the other side a necessary adaptation of human beings to their part as ‘commodity labour’. So the new framework of discussing Lifelong Learning seems necessarily also to be a discussion of the basic education ideas of modernization.

Lifelong Learning is a Critique of Institutions

Lifelong learning was originally launched as a democratic and humanistic project, closely connected with ideas about equality. It was in it self a part of an enlightenment optimism on behalf of education. Instead of education being once for a life time the early creators of the idea assigned a permanent and open access to education and learning as a democratizing and liberating force. In an international context in particular this idea of general and political education was endorsed idealistically. At national levels in most countries this policy programme was not regarded to be very committing, and was mainly taken into account by NGOs. However, as a discourse of education, lifelong learning has a radical built-in assumption, which is also confirmed by recent economic concerns it assumes that learning takes place in all spheres of life, not only in schools and institutions. Sometimes it is added into ‘lifelong’....and life wide ....’learning’, to complete the topical metaphor. It thus relativizes the importance of schools and compulsory education, on one side emphasizing the limits of the modern disembeddedness of learning from basic social structures, while on the other side also opening our eyes to an immense potential of self-directed learning outside schools. In adult and continuing education there seems to be at the same time two converging processes going on: an institutionalising process, adding schools for adults to the schools for children and adolescents, which is in continuation of a basic trend in modernization namely institution building. And at the same time a de-institutionalising process, broadening the concept of learning across the boundaries of school.

The concept of lifelong learning itself, emphasising learning instead of institutional education, transcends the institutional rationales of modernization. This emphasis on learning rather than education has lately been seen as an educational drawback - and sometimes it is also part of a neo-conservative dismantling of welfare policies. But it may also be integrated into a critique of the illusionary expectations that are put on institutional education, in terms of efficiency and in terms of their emancipation potential.

This criticism of institutions makes clear that the existing educational institutions are unable or inadequate to fulfil their purpose and promises; rather they might be an obstacle to learning. The postmodernist critique of the educational optimism takes the critique one step more in a radical direction, as a critique of the basic humanist educational programme. A critic of institutions par excellence, Michel Foucault, points out the inner relation between institutions, knowledge and power. Educational institutions, by means of knowledge exercise control and restriction on the potential experience of the protagonists, allowing for some ways of organising of knowledge and blocking others. The term discourse in this context has the critical implication that all organised knowledge and communication excludes essential levels of knowledge related to practices and bodily experience and reproduces power relations.

Foucault universalises the experience, that modernization processes have largely discredited knowledge in spite of the fact that modern ideas assign to knowledge the expectation of enlightenment, emancipation and autonomy. But what is the relation between this critique of the modernization and enlightenment processes, or rather the construction of the reverse side of the utopian message that lifelong learning will take place everywhere, and through the entire life period? When (educational) institutions are overcome or at least relativized, which structuring factors for learning appear instead?

I believe all possible ideological answers tend to float into this ‘vacuum’. Sometimes regression into naive versions of experiential learning, assuming that reality is again becoming an un-mediated schoolteacher or to some kinds of cultural traditionalism. Sometimes to humanistic educational ideas, that are not basically different from those inherent in the educational institutions - only now they are attached to the individual and extended to all spheres and phases of life. At best these reductions serve as a take off reference for rethinking the basic content of lifelong learning idea, reflecting the contradictions in the modernization process that have brought forward the idea. This we shall at least attempt.

The Humanization of Work and Human Resource Development

It was stated above that the socio-economic need for human resources, and the insufficiency of educational provision, was a decisive condition for the present concern with lifelong learning. But is this a true societal programme, a civilizing force? What happens when learning is ‘re-embedded’ in real life, such as working life?

You could begin with the optimistic question of Kern/Schumann in 1984: Ende der Arbeitsteilung? Even using a concept of skilling informed by industrial sociology Kern and Schumann by empirical evidence made plausible that the human potentials of labour were becoming decisive, demanded by capitalist reorganization of industrial development. The subordination of labour to skills needs implied not only the more generalized skills and knowledge, but the demand for subjective qualities more than anything else. Even industrial workers must be co-operative, responsible, creative and autonomous.

In the discussions co-op of the 70s neo-Marxist ideas in Danish critical education, the research concept of skills-related education to the production of societal labour force (Andersen et al 1992, Salling Olesen 1996). The term was coined in a double manner - as a term of critical/Marxian theory and as a term of empirical industrial sociology. Education produces a societally objectified exchangeable asset based on the use value of labour in a capitalist (re)production, and from this follows a functional subordination of the learning processes in educational institutions to the necessities of producing the commodity labour. The seemingly new quality of labour and its contradictory demand on human labour was called ‘general qualification’ - more or less equivalent to the German term ‘key competence’, ‘Schlüsselqualifikation’ - whereas I have the feeling that 'Qualification’ has a somewhat more limited meaning, and a technocratic flavour, in English.

In the classic era of industrialism you would name the masculine bodily oriented and collectively controlled wage labour socialisation and consciousness as the ‘general qualification’. The British cultural sociology, the ‘anti psychiatry’, and Vesters’ great historical study have accounted differently for the historical creation of the subjectivity of wage labour - and it is useful to make clear that work socialization has a specific shape of subjectivity involved - historically shaped, distorted may be, but also involving products of learning processes - new skills, new social insights, new levels of self regulation - as compared with the previous historical phases. It was the product of a lifelong learning process (Salling Olesen (1998), Vester (1972)).

Several other structural trends have reinforced the assumption about the inclining importance of general qualification - and on the other side a critical analysis which seriously questions the optimistic implications in the trend - both new modes of social control and new marginalizations make the changes in work quality more dubious. Is the qualitative change of the work process and the new demands/options for ‘humanization’ and subjective involvement the end of the alienation (Entfremdung) of work? Is ‘general qualification’ a take off ramp for ‘the living work’ to reintegrate and take control over the societal organisation of life processes?

It may be a good question, even if it is foolish to offer an answer. It may be a good question because it calls for new ways of at least dealing with it theoretically.

The concept of ‘qualification’ was a contribution to a critical theory of education and work and also a critique of the (idealistic) educational thought and of progressive educational practice (reform pedagogy, humanistic enlightenment), explaining the structure and function of education which is independent of and which may also invisible for the educational actors. But it ruled out the question of educational practice, and even more importantly in this context, it paid little attention to the contradictory concrete production process of the ‘use value’, the living worker and the living work. But there is no clear alternative conception of subjectivity in education and learning in this original neo-Marxian analysis - just because the old communist and social democrat voluntarisms had been stripped away.

In the discourse of human resource development lifelong learning is integrated in ideas like ‘organisational learning’ and 'workplace based learning’, which refer to an organisation culture framework. Most often these concepts link lifelong learning to more or less narrow management strategies, which are able to and willing to establish compromises with more or less narrow individual concepts of the social interests of workers/employees. The consequence is 'divide-et-impere’ and the cultivation of corporate spirit. Apart from the political consequences which I will discuss shortly, this is a somewhat ambiguous development. Workplace identification and corporate spirit may very well support learning processes that would otherwise - for example in a traditional educational setting - not be possible. In so far as we also find examples where unskilled workers, sceptical with education, become active learners within a workplace embedded process. But in so far as work qualification is rooted in collective habitual experiences and in collective consciousness connected with workers’ collective and a craft or professional identity, they are excluded from the learning process.

Even from a managerial point of view this may present a problem with the change processes in craft based industries (resistance of workers, loss of habitual and tacit knowledge) and in professions (resistance, dequalification, loss of quality standards). However, this is not really theoretically reflected. In the very extensive discussion and practice of organisational development, human resource development and organisational learning you find very primitive or non-existing ideas about the relation between the collective and organisational processes, and the learning processes of individuals. In the consultancy business and amongst human resource managers, personal development, career advisors etc you find some practical experience and rules-of-thumb, but little analytical interest and knowledge.

To the extent that lifelong learning is promoted and taken over by corporate programmes and human resource managers in connection with workplaces, it may cause a devastation of professionalism on learning. I am not arguing here, because I think I present the shared prejudices of educationalists.

This takes us to the more important aspect, and more political, I think: what is the alternative view on lifelong learning? The re-embedding of learning into work life may be very restricted in the sense that only some aspects of learning are called for, and only some aspects of learners’ potential are activated. It may be a reinforcement of the general disaster of modernization: that the technical and instrumental development is pushed forwards once more, by an enhanced mobilization of human resources, but the other side, the civilizing and enlightening one is repressed. The hopes for an automatic humanization effect of the new types of work organization, and the consequent needs for learning need to be developed.

The 're-subjectivation’ of work, however, is not just congruent with humanistic ideas of education and subjectivity - although some seem to assume so. It is not a return from the industrial shaping of man in some generations to an original humanity. Basic humanity has just within the period of industrial development changed radically. Children’ s social, intellectual and emotional capacities are others than before, and the adult workers carry a history of collective experience - more or less consciously - as a base of all their aspects of work identity. The resubjectivation of work does not mean ‘taking work back to its original subjective quality’ - it means inviting/demanding and allowing new forms of co-operation and/or new types of autonomy, which can be developed in relation to the social and societal context of work and technology today.

So the new human resource development agenda implies the need for a politicization of work, remembering the Greek meaning of the word: making it an object of cultural action. The perspectives on lifelong learning depend upon collective experience building, that can encompass and develop the potentials in new work qualities without loosing sight of previous work identities.

Lifelong Learning and Invidualization

The critique of the institutional solutions of modernity is also questioning the underlying emancipation strategies of for example the labour movement and the social democratic welfare state. The ground of a collective experience seems devaluatued, at the same time as the individual becomes the subject of his own liberation

This goes hand in hand with the broader observation of a cultural shift in the core cultures of the modernizing project, from social solidarity and collectivity, to individual orientations and emancipation strategies, accompanied by a multiplication in values and life strategies (U. Beck and others). In the sociological discussion there are both theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that people develop new life strategies and attitudes, less oriented to welfare state solutions, social institutions, and collective values. So the question - ahistorically - comes up: is this a swing back of the pendulum to an early liberal and individualistic conception of modernity?

There are, however, also arguments that this shift in attitudes is not in the direction of less solidarity, but in the direction of a new form of solidarity (e.g. ‘Everyday Life Solidarity - Zoll 1988, Zoll et al (1989). What is true is not only an empirical question, nor a question about theoretical interpretation - it still depends.....On what? On what is learned in lifelong learning, and how future learning processes relate to the experience of modernity.

I see these processes of reshaping solidarity as a product of modernization, but also as a modernization process still taking place. It provides new challenges and chances for adult learning, which have yet to be developed and concretised by the protagonists themselves. Adult and continuing education may certainly be a remedy in crisis management of a capitalist economy and the national states - not sufficient but necessary. But it may also encompass the utopian potentials of the modernization project. My point is that modernity is not a homogenous and well defined ‘epoch in history’. It is a process still in its becoming.

The end of modernity, the individualisation and the enhanced individual cultural expressions, are often neo-conservative - sometimes also a critical - condensations of some grounded observations of changes in culture and society. They are, however, changes that may well be seen as strictly modern phenomena. Giddens speaks of radical modernity (1990). I would like to speak about 'late’ or 'developed modernity’, meaning something more than a phase or a degree, but underscoring the processual character:

It is a societally developed modernity in the sense, that in involves most/all individuals in modern life conditions. The modernist poet of 1913 (Ulysses) was a vanguard protagonist and critic of modernity. Today it is difficult to imagine a better example for a vanguard than the modern female workers, who have to cope with their (new) wage labour and their gendered experience of a split everyday life world. The combined process of gender emancipation and societalisation of work make women into subjects in a societal sense, but the process is only in its fulfilment by the fact that they do it. You might also call it a democratization of modernity.

And modernisation is a subjective acquisition: to be subjects in a modernised world is something we have to learn. One may think of the dilemmas of the labour movement. The labour movement - itself a product of modernity - developed a solidarity culture with strong premodern communitarian qualities, linked to societal concepts of interest and a national state oriented concept of politics. This solidarity culture, which constitutes its subjective quality and inner coherence, is now being eroded by the modernized life world and values of the membership - including the relative growth of a ' wage labour middle class’.

Lifelong learning as a concept refers to the life history context of learning. However, if you see lifelong learning as the late modern version of the classic modern idea about 'Bildung’ you must first deconstruct its historical identification with basic school education, and reflect the changes in society and culture - and the collective experience from the modernization process.