ABSTRACT
Thus far in this study we have shown how learning of all forms is affected by the structures of society, so that a sociology of human learning is not only a possible way of understanding learning, but a significant one. We have also argued that globalisation has exerted pressures on the structures of almost every society for change and one of the directions in which societies are being moved is towards the knowledge economy which, in its turn, is having effects on the educational systems of society and also on the lifestyles of members of the population. The social situation of competition, innovation and rapid change generated by globalisation in a knowledge economy have led to the emergence of lifelong learning. In the last chapter we explored the two meanings of the concept, both private and public, and concluded that there was a sense in which it referred to an interrelationship of personal learning and recurrent education. However, that interrelationship is not as simple as it appears on the surface since, as we pointed out, a result of the lowering of barriers between different sectors of society is that there are now many sites for learning and they intermesh. Learning is not only lifelong, it is life-wide. For heuristic purposes only, we are going to separate lifelong and life-wide into two chapters, dealing with lifelong learning here and life-wide learning in the following chapter. In this chapter we will, first, discuss the idea that lifelong learning has become a new social movement, then we will look at lifelong learning as a commodity; third, we will look at recurrent education and its relationship to practice; fourth, relevant types of personal learning as a response to the social forces of globalisation will be examined; fifth the value of lifelong learning is assessed; finally, lifelong learning has a demographic aspect and so we will look at learning and ageing. In the following chapter we will examine learning in relation to the life-world in which life-wide learning features much more prominently than it does in this chapter.
