ABSTRACT
Lifelong learning is a buzzword in the contemporary education vocabulary but it is one with a long history: this chapter presents an overview of the history. However, it came to the fore as a result of the demands of the knowledge economy, although it went by a number of different names as it emerged – each having a slightly different philosophy. Because it was so tied to the knowledge economy, its wider usage was not so widely explored but this chapter examines these briefly in the third section – especially the education of seniors and the learning region. It is, perhaps, in this section that we understand more fully the implications of the concept.
