Creating the European learning citizen - which citizen for which Europe?

Abstract

This volume is one of the outcomes of a European Union-funded thematic network—EURONE&T—which brought together scholars from Europe and beyond in order to critically reflect on the way the European Learning Space is being constructed. The network set out to investigate the implications of the European integration and enlargement processes on learning related policies in the EU, including the new member states. As we will note in more details further on, education and training have historically been outside of—or at best marginal to—the policy remit of the European Commission, given that the key concerns of the EU have tended to focus more specifically around economic and political agendas. Learning moved much more to centre-stage in the post-Maastricht, and more so in the post-Lisbon era, when the EU aspired to make important strides forward in establishing itself as a ‘knowledge-based society’ in an attempt to turn the tide of global competition in its favour. As many of the contributors to this volume note, this new policy focus on education, articulated as a response to the perceived threats of globalisation, produced specific effects at both member state and Community levels, promoting a particularly economistic and technocratic approach to learning. A key concern of EURONE&T was to understand the learning society more broadly and holistically, that is as a society where knowledge and continuous learning occupy a central position and affect all aspects of life: not just the economic, but the political and social as well. In contrast to mainstream discourses which tend to privilege economic, technological and institutional issues, EURONE&T set out to put the learning citizen at the centre of its work. This volume reflects this stand-point. It thus investigates the impact of the European integration and enlargement processes on learning related policies, but it does so by foregrounding the manner in which such policies contribute—or fail to contribute—to creating and supporting the learning citizen. The present collection of papers has to be seen within the context of the overall thematic project, discussing learning related policies from different perspectives by the four thematic EURONET domains guiding the interdisciplinary discourses among scholars from Europe and abroad.