Lifelong learning for civic employees and employable citizens?

Abstract

How is learning being shaped for young people exposed to shorter front-end education and more regularised further and continuing education? How should learning for employees in their late 50’s and early 60’s be organised, with a view to having them employed for more years so that the pension systems are not suffocated? Is the only scope of training arrangements for unemployed to have them integrated in the market economy or could they also be trained for new challenges that the non-market economy (‘économie sociale’) and a growing number of (upmarket?) non-governmental organisations are dealing with? All these questions—extracted from the public debate in Europe—touch upon the citizenship as well as the employability dimension of lifelong learning (LLL). According to a Memorandum on Lifelong learning from the European Commission, LLL encompasses ‘all purposeful learning activity, whether formal or informal, undertaken on an ongoing basis with the aim of improving knowledge, skills and competences’ (EC, 2000). Education has often been exposed to the contrasting demands of economic utility (the employability dimension) on the one hand, and societal utility (the citizenship dimension) on the other. Similarly, LLL is serving a double purpose: it provides training for ongoing as well as future changes in the labour market and it is meant to contribute to the socialisation of the citizens. Fratczak-Rudnicka and Torney-Purta (2001) point out that the very notion of ‘knowledge’ includes fundamental concepts of democracy and democratic institutions as well as concepts of citizenship. The aim of this article is to discuss the possible impact of national and European measures for lifelong learning on European citizens as individuals in relation to the two dimensions employability and citizenship. This impact is elucidated by means of the notions individual and collective learning. In view of the national variations in the field of education and training and due to the dependence of the European LLL discourse on national practices, this discussion has to start at national level. For that purpose we will use Nordic countries (in particular Norway) and Spain as ‘cases’. We assume that there is a slow penetration of LLL in national education and training systems. These systems are not yet transformed into anything like a LLL system although there is a national discourse on LLL. The structure of the article is as follows: after a discussion of key notions behind the thematic field of LLL, we pinpoint what is needed in a framework for analysing the main underlying dimensions. Then we present a summary of observations from the Nordic countries and Spain with a view to identifying some national influences on the LLL discourse at the level of the European Union. Afterwards we focus on policy-making with regard to the citizenship and employability dimensions of LLL. In the following section we scrutinise some initiatives close to the citizenship dimension. In a section leading up to the conclusive part of the article, we discuss the chances of sustaining the citizenship dimension in an era of increased individualisation of learning.