ABSTRACT
The author explains that his reflections begin with a concern with the policy language of lifelong learning. A tendency in the policy literature from the 1960s onwards to conflate its use with the very different term lifelong education by using the two terms interchangeably, is solved today by talking about lifelong learning only. Foucault's own power as a social critic rests on the persuasiveness of genealogies with their narrative of the socialized self as a self subjectivated into the truth of the society and hence into docility. More germane to the purposes, is how people modern subjects turn it onto ourselves through practices of self-examination whereby people are encouraged to produce self-knowledge, the truth about ourselves differently through confessional practices. Self-knowledge through confessional practices, on the other hand, works with very different rules of conduct, which constitute a very different game of truth played with oneself and with others.
