ABSTRACT
Political demands for strategies to motivate more people for lifelong learning come at a time when profound doubts about globalisation and technological progress foster discourses of `crisis', `social polarisation' and `social transformation' in education policy throughout Europe and in New Zealand, the United States and Australia. In particular, growing concern about `a risk society' encourages new de®nitions and regulation of social, economic and personal `risk' that require new social and political responses. These movements re¯ect a profound loss of con®dence in Enlightenment ideas of rational `truth', scienti®c and social progress and technological innovation (Beck, 1992) alongside increasing scepticism about both the possibility and desirability of education as a key to scienti®cally progressive and humane knowledge for the `good of all'.
