ABSTRACT
Adult education in the context of postmodernity may have lost some of its foundational certainties but it has also enabled a fuller range of adult learning practices to emerge. In this context lifelong learning has become a powerful resource for challenging traditional educational boundaries and institutions. Lifelong learning helps us imagine and value different sources and forms of knowledge which occur outside designated educational spaces. Who controls learning, what it means, what constitutes a curriculum are subject to ‘incredulity’ and doubt. In the postmodern condition of education these signal a specific attitude or approach to engage with authoritative claims to know and the canonical status of modernist knowledge claims, and the illusive search for mastery. Lifelong learning is implicated in this postmodern condition which, the authors argue, is opening up (as well as closing down) ambivalent spaces for learning.
