Abstract:

As a prominent discourse of neoliberal regime, lifelong education/learning is discussed around the concepts of information-based economy and competition. The underlining assumption of this liberal rhetoric, which sanctifies lifelong learning is that companies need educated labour so that they can easily compete each other within the context of the information-based global economy. This study claims that while the recent theory and policies of life-long learning function to create a stable condition for capital, it also offers the grounds for an unstable working life. Neoliberal economy is based on flexibility, half-time, insecure and contracted labour. The new regime demands radical transformations from individuals who are framed as flexible, permanently ready, selfrenovative, instantly prepared and “employable” subjects through the discourse of lifelong learning. Lifelong learning also complies with the neoliberal Zeitgeist in that neoliberalism tries to disseminate the concepts of risk, ambiguity, and discontinuity instead of progress, stability and security in the working life. Thus, the discourse of lifelong learning implies that the recent working conditions have much risk without permanent-employment guarantees, and lifelong education is presented as the only way to overcome and/or manage the risks. In addition, this process imposes individual responsibility for permanent “employability” by adapting to lifelong learning. This study focuses on the possibilities and conditions for dissociating lifelong learning from its delimitation to the neoliberal content. In this frame, it is urgent to transform the aims of lifelong learning from constructing the vocational capacity and training in the service of market into capacity development for tolerance, negotiation, conflict resolution, democratic communication and civil relations, based upon trust. This article emphasized the need to reconceptualises lifelong learning beyond the credentials of the new economy that impose fetishism with certification and “the nightmare of uselessness” with a view to social justice. To this extent, it proposes that lifelong learning should be reconsidered not from the perspective of marketing or management but within the holistic framework of social goals, public benefit and critical understanding.

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