ABSTRACT
This chapter charts some of the assumptions underpinning the policy focus on lifelong learning in the United Kingdom government’s 1998 Green Paper, The Learning Age. It argues that the ‘new age’ of lifelong learning is itself a manifestation of a certain new age, culturalist discourse wherein values, attitudes and affect displace evidence and rigour in the construction of policy. This is examined in the context of some of the contemporary changes in employment and work. The chapter argues there is a parallel between the culturalist harnessing of attitudes through lifelong learning to the goal of a learning society and those to be found in measures to develop learning organisations. This promotes a culture of lifelong (learning, wherein earning and learning increasingly are fused, within which there remain a range of tensions and possibilities.
