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Article Excerpt
Australian public policy adopted the concept of lifelong learning in the 1980s and harnessed it to human capital theory to articulate a new policy emphasis on 'up-skilling' the Australian labour force. This paper addresses the question of how this conception of lifelong learning has fared in practice as Australian Commonwealth government policies, including those related to education and training, have shifted to embrace strong market orientations and priorities. Have the policy objectives of a more highly trained labour force been met or has the concept of lifelong learning become increasingly uncoupled from links with the nation-building exercise of preparing Australia for the 'information age'?
Keywords
education work relationship
educational policy
educational change
knowledge economy
economic impact
recurrent education
Introduction
The concept of lifelong learning still draws much of its rhetorical strength from the modernist and progressive elements that link education to economic development through human-capital theory (OECD, 1996) and to personal and social or 'civil' actualisation through liberal educational philosophy (Delores, 1996). However, in reality, the notion of lifelong learning has moved to embrace market orientations that place the individual learner not so much within a strong civil society as within an economic environment in which he or she must take responsibility for a whole new range of economic imperatives and choices. Following Rose (1996, p. 327) we take the view that the learning society concept, upon which terms such as 'lifelong learning' and 'knowledge nation' draw their strength, has become part of a wider discursive formation that privileges an 'individuation of society'. This positions individuals as the bearers of risk and responsibility. It effectively shifts perceptions of individuals' relationships vis-a-vis the wider society away from that of individuals as citizens with citizen rights to that of individuals as consumers with consumer rights.
From this perspective, learning becomes the primary strategy that individuals can mobilise to manage risk and responsibility both at work and in other parts of their social and cultural life. Individuals participate in society less as 'active citizens,' through political and other social institutions, and more as active consumers who are constantly marketing their 'self'. This is a form of agency in which:
[T]he individual [is] to conduct his or her life, and that of his or her family, as a kind of enterprise, seeking to enhance and capitalize on existence itself through calculated acts and investments (Rose, 1999, p. 164).
This is a shift in both discursive location and actual ways of being. It fuels, for example, a shift in the nature of knowledge required by learners. Priority is given to the development of informal 'knowledgeability' (know-how) over the deep expertise (knowledge of structure and relationship--the know-what and know why) that traditionally accompanied the formation of an educated person. It is also a shift away from the collectivist idea of citizenship to the individualised practice of the consumer.
How has this shift come about? In this paper we attempt to trace something of the history of this movement by examining the emergence and development of the lifelong learning concept in Australian public policy. This is not a comprehensive history. It is an attempt at what Rose (1999, p. 58) describes as a 'diagnostic approach' to sociological inquiry in which the aim is to 'make the given once more strange and to cause us to wonder at how it came to appear so natural'.
Changing metaphors of the learning society
Sleepers wake!
In the early 1980s, Labor politician, Barry Jones, published a book called Sleepers Wake (Jones, 1983) in which he argued that the new information and communication technologies (ICT) presented a significant challenge to Australia. In particular, computer and communications technologies had the potential to increase inequalities because people's access was dependent on their ability to buy relevant equipment. Describing this division of the 'information-rich' and 'information poor', Jones argued for government to support universal access to ICT. This 'wake-up call' was presented as an additional issue that should be addressed within Australia's established institutional regime. Its potential to destabilise those institutional arrangements was not emphasised to a significant degree, except via its impact on inequality. Informational inequality would undercut the traditional 'fair go' for all Australian citizens.
Clever country
Between 1983 and 1996, the federal Labor government oversaw a substantial re-working of public policy and institutional arrangements. Building on a consensus-based accord with unions and employers, the Commonwealth advanced a radical macro- and micro-economic reform agenda aimed at positioning Australia to meet the challenges of increased international competition. The framework for this wide-reaching reform agenda was articulated through Australia Reconstructed (Australian Council of Trade Unions/Trade Development Council, 1987), the report of a joint government-union mission that investigated the economic management strategies being developed in small to medium western European countries. This initiative, driven by the labour movement, aimed at protecting employees in a rapidly changing economy. Its recommendations emphasised, amongst other things, the development of an active labour market policy to facilitate economic restructuring, support for individuals caught in the fall-out from changes in industry, and the reform of education and training to support skill formation.
These reforms were seen as ways of increasing people's opportunities and choices, irrespective of their achievements in their initial schooling or changes in the employment situation. Opening up opportunities for individuals to learn and to gain recognition for that learning across their life course would allow career mobility even when the individual had left school early or had poor early learning experiences. The objective was skill formation to build an internationally competitive workforce in Australia. The goal was creating a 'Clever Country'--a goal that the then Minister for Education, John Dawkins saw as being brought into being through a reform of the purposes, objectives and priorities of schooling (Dawkins, 1990).
Lifelong learning
The Clever Country metaphor captured the Labor government's new emphasis on structural reform in education and training in order to more closely meet the needs of a restructuring economy. The lifelong learning policy agenda also grew out of this new emphasis on the relationship between education, training and a restructured labour market (Axford & Moyes, 2003; Watson, 2003) This new agenda linked lifelong learning to human capital theory--the notion that credentialled education and training built up an individual's capital that could be transacted in the labour market.
From the early 1990s, this link was put under strain as the lifelong learning agenda became increasingly tied to a more market-oriented political agenda that saw learning as a personal investment that returned private benefits to individuals via increased earnings (Marginson, 1997). In this sense, the lifelong learning policy agenda helped shift the focus of reform away from workerist notions of skill formation to agendas that emphasised 'choice and markets' and privatisation in education. This trajectory was advanced by the federal Labor government, particularly in the vocational education and training sector (VET), through the 'competencies' movement (Collins, 1993; Jackson, 1993) and, in higher education, through the introduction of service charges in universities and later the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). It was driven even more aggressively across all sectors of education and training by pro free-market Liberal-National Party governments at state levels and, after the 1996 election, federally. In fact, it is possible to identify at least four separate policy trajectories that emerged during the 1990s that drew on the lifelong learning concept.
Reskilling The first of these trajectories--that aimed at reskilling the Australian workforce--was clearly articulated in the early part of the decade. The reskilling agenda took in a wide range of curriculum and social policy matters. It included the introduction of competency-based curriculum in VET...
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