Looking at adult education and lifelong learning through the lens of anachronism

In this paper I will reflect on my understanding of anachronism in relation to the concepts of adult education and lifelong learning as used by UNESCO. Anachronism is a concept used in historiography. Simply put, anachronism means placing an event or a concept into the wrong time, which is considered one of the major sins a historian can commit. Historians distinguish between several forms of anachronism, such as anachronism of discourse, when we use contemporary language to refer to a period in the past; or anachronism of perspective, which is to a certain extent unavoidable because we always study the past from the position of the social, political and cultural context in which we are situated. In my doctoral dissertation on UNESCO’s role in shaping the concept of education as a human right, I conducted a genealogy of the concepts of adult education and lifelong learning. Lifelong education emerged out of adult education in UNESCO in the 1960s. The six International Conferences on Adult Education (CONFINTEA I-VI, 1949-2009) are considered milestones in the articulation of adult education. Similarly, the report Learning to be (1972), otherwise known as the Faure report , and the report Learning: The treasure within (1996), otherwise known as the Delors report , are considered key documents with which UNESCO established its humanistic view of lifelong learning (Author, 2015). In the process of my dissertation research, I have come to understand that the concept of lifelong learning as it is being used in the current neoliberal policy discourse greatly differs from the concept as it was used in the Faure report and the Delors report and that the “horizon” in which I approach my study is shaped by my somewhat anachronistic “fore-understandings” (Gadamer, 1975/2013) deriving from the neoliberal context in which I am situated. Drawing on the work of the intellectual historians Skinner (1969), Bevir (1999) and Syrjamaki (2011), I will reflect on the historical dimension of the concepts of “adult education” and “lifelong learning” and on the process of constantly “translating between different meaning-systems...between past and present” (White, 1982, p. 284). To my surprise, one of the experts I interviewed for my dissertation reacted with some confusion when I asked him about the “humanistic” approach to education and responded that that was the “normal” approach to education to take during the 1970s. In the 1960s when the human capital approach emerged, the humanist and the human capital perspective were much more compatible than in the present time, where we see an overwhelmingly economistic discourse of education, leading to a nostalgia of a humanistic perspective on education, which is evident from the motto of the 2015 Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), “imagining a humanist education globally”. I will argue that an awareness of the historicity of the concepts of lifelong learning is important to avoid anachronistic interpretations and combine this argument with a demonstration of how the “horizon” of adult education and lifelong learning has changed since the 1960s.

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