ABSTRACT
The life course is an institution that crystallised with the onset of Modernity (Kohli, 1985) and provides a formal ‘framework’ for the biographical education and training processes that individuals undergo. This framework exists regardless of the specific way in which individuals orient themselves to it (e.g. in an affirmative manner, striving for preset goals, or rubbing up against it, breaking with it, modifying it, etc.). There is a societal ‘curriculum’ for the individual’s life from birth to death that is more or less defined in norms and expectations, constantly renegotiated and subject to historical change. One part of the education and training processes that we pass through or actively shape during our life is
based relatively closely on this curriculum and regulated by formal learning objectives and qualifications. To emphasise this aspect, Schulze (1993a) speaks of ‘curricular learning’. ‘Learning in the life history context’, in contrast, obeys other (biographical) rules, but cannot dissociate itself entirely from the aforementioned framework. There are tensions and frictions between these two dimensions, which are mutually dependent on each other (Schulze, 1993a; Kade and Seitter, 1996). In order to understand biographical learning processes, it is therefore essential to reflect on the respective
life course models that operate within a given society. These are not ‘external variables’ that are always preexistent, but are shaped and formed in decisive ways by institutionalised education, for example. This was shown by Kohli (1985) for the classical subdivision of the life course in modern Western societies into ‘preparatory, activity and retirement phases’. In the latter life course model, times and spaces of formalised learning are defined by institutional classification (school, vocational training system) and by the temporal localisation of socialisation and skilling in childhood and youth, and all members of society are obliged to pass through these predefined phases. However, the role of education and training in the life course is not confined to the ‘preparatory’ phase, but it structures, in the form of a chain of options and branching points, the entire biographical curriculum. This holds true for the model, described by Kohli, for the standard biography in modern societies – the school system for general education, and the skilling levels and profiles defined by it, specifies certain starting opportunities and establishes the direction that the individual’s life subsequently takes, as well as the social positioning of the individual; these steps are almost impossible to achieve with subsequent qualifications (Rabe-Kleberg, 1993b). The school is simultaneously a key location for practising formal learning. By internalising the specific content of learning, individuals also learn the various forms of learning. Qualifications and experience gained in school structure the subsequent status passages of biography to
an enormous extent – vocational training and/or the transition to employment – and together with initial vocational training they establish the framework for the entire employment biography. Although continuing vocational education or retraining can create new options, these are always dependent on the initial level achieved and on prestructured career patterns that differ considerably not only from one occupation to the next, but also according to social positioning criteria (class, gender, ethnicity, nationality), and are largely absent in the typical women’s occupations, for example (Rabe-Kleberg, 1993a; Born, 2000). The last major phase of biography, retirement, is also defined in crucial ways in terms of its basic conditional framework – not only one’s economic, cultural and social capital, but also one’s health, physical and (life)time resources – by one’s previous employment biography, and to that extent is dependent at least indirectly on the person’s education and training history.
