Lifelong Learning

Concepts and Contexts

Jim Crowther, Peter Sutherland, Jim Crowther, Peter Sutherland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134260430
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

Lifelong learning has developed enormously as a distinct area of study within education in recent years not least because numerous governments and educational strategists have become very vocal supporters of new ways of learning throughout all stages of life. This guide to the topic brings together new writing from some of the leading thinkers in the field to offer a broad ranging and detailed snapshot of the position to date. The book provides a critical summary of current developments in understanding adult learning and the social context in which they are located. This provides a background for the framing of issues and the problems that emerge in institutional and non-formal contexts of lifelong learning. Students undertaking courses of study in this area as well as a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate students in a variety of professional areas will find the material essential reading.

Part I
Perspectives on adult and lifelong learning

Chapter 2
What is special about adult learning?

Knud Illeris

Is adult learning distinctly different from learning in childhood? this question has been at the centre of many debates on the status of adult education and, in the context of lifelong learning, it clearly has significant implications. the author argues cogently in the affir mative and draws on a considerable wealth of evidence and experience to make his case. One of the key issues, which make a difference, is the need adults experience to control their learning and, where this does not occur, the end result is adults feeling at best ambivalent and at worst demotivated. the message of this chapter is that adults have to take more responsibility for their learning – and be allowed to do so! If lifelong learning is to be useful to adults it must be based on conditions that respect and support the unique requirements of adult learning.

Introduction

The last decade has seen lifelong learning become a key issue in international education policy. The concept basically involves the simple message that learning can and should be a lifelong occupation. This poses the fundamental question of whether the processes of learning are the same irrespective of age. For the traditional psychology of learning, there are no age-conditioned differences. Learning has been studied as a common phenomenon, for which researchers endeavoured to discover the decisive and basic learning mechanisms, and research and tests often observed animals and humans in constructed laboratory situations.

In relation to adult education, many scholars and researchers have claimed that adults’ learning as a psychological function is basically similar to children’s learning. This was, for instance, the underlying assumption behind the massive resistance to American Malcolm Knowles’ launching of a separate discipline of ‘andragogy’, dealing with adult education and learning and at the same time limiting ‘pedagogy’ to the area of children’s upbringing and schooling (e.g. Knowles 1970; Hartree 1984; Davonport 1993). More recently Alan Rogers, in connection with his very fine description of adults’ learning, has deliberately maintained ‘that there is nothing distinctive about the kind of learning undertaken by adults’ (Rogers 2003:7; see also Rogers and Illeris 2003).

This depends, however, on the kind of definition of learning one is referring to. In my understanding, as developed and explained in my books the three Dimensions of Learning and Adult Education and Adult Learning (Illeris 2002, 2004), learning always includes two integrated but very different processes: the external interaction process between the learner and the social and material environment, and the internal psychological process of elaboration and acquisition. If one sticks to the internal psychological process, as traditional learning psychology does, it is to some extent possible to claim that, independent of age differences, learning processes are fundamentally of the same kind throughout life. I shall return to this later.

If the social interaction process is seen as a necessary and integrated part of learning, the picture changes immediately. Many modern learning theorists actually do so, and some even consider learning as mainly or only a social process (Lave and Wenger 1991; Gergen 1994). It is obvious that the nature of our relationship to our social and societal environment changes considerably during life from the newborn child’s total dependence to a striving for independence in youth and adulthood and, eventually, a new sort of dependence in old age. These changes strongly influence the character of the social dimension of our learning.

Children’s and adults’ learning

In order to see what is characteristic of adult learning, I shall start by pointing out some basic features of children’s learning.

In general, learning in childhood could be described as a continuous campaign to capture the world. The child is born into an unknown world and learning is about acquiring this world and learning to deal with it. In this connection, two learning-related features are prominent, especially for the small child. First, chil-dren’s learning is comprehensive and uncensored. The child learns everything within its grasp, throws itself into everything, and is limited only by its biological development and the nature of its surroundings. Second, the child places utter confidence in the adults around it. Ithas only those adults and the ways in which they behave to refer to, without any possibility of evaluating or choosing what it is presented with. It must, for example, learn the language these adults speak and practise the culture they practise.

Throughout childhood, the child’s capturing of its surroundings is fundamentally uncensored and trusting as it endeavours, in an unlimited and indiscriminate way, to make use of the opportunities that present themselves. Of course, late modern society has led to growing complexity and even confusion of this situation as older children receive a lot of impressions from their peers and especially from the mass media, which go far beyond the borders of their own environment. But still the open and confident approach must be recognized as the starting point.

Opposite this stands learning during adulthood. Being an adult essentially means that an individual is able and willing to assume responsibility for his/her own life and actions. Formally, our society ascribes such ‘adulthood’ to individuals when they attain the age of 18. In reality, it is a gradual process that takes place throughout the period of youth, which, as we see it today, may last well into the twenties or be entirely incomplete if the formation of a relatively stable identity is chosen as the criterion for its completion at the mental level (which is the classical description of this transition provided by Erik Erikson 1968).

As for learning, being an adult also means, in principle, that the individual accepts responsibility for his/her own learning, i.e. more or less consciously sorts information and decides whathe/she wants and does not want to learn. The situation in today’s complicated modern society is after all that the volume of what may be learned far exceeds the ability of any single individual, and this is true not only concerning content in a narrow sense, but also applies to the views and attitudes, perceptions, communications options, behavioural patterns, lifestyle, etc. that may be chosen. So adults need to be selective in what they choose to learn from the various potential sources of information and options they are exposed to.

As a general conclusion it is, however, important to maintain that in contrast to children’s uncensored and confident learning, adults’ learning is basically selective and self-directed, or to put it in more concrete terms:

• adults learn what they want to learn and what is meaningful for them to learn;

• adults draw on the resources they already have in their learning;

• adults take as much responsibility for their learning as they want to take (if they are allowed to); and

• adults are not very inclined to learn something they are not interested in, or in which they cannot see the meaning or importance. At any rate, typically, they only learn it partially, in a distorted way or with a lack of motivation that makes what is learned extremely vulnerable to oblivion and difficult to apply in situations not subjectively related to the learning context.

This implies that learning incentives, such as for instance adult education options, consciously or subconsciously are met by sceptical questions and considerations. For example, why do ‘they’ want me to learn this? What can I use it for? How does it fit into my personal life perspectives?

Outside influence, whether it assumes the form of conversation, guidance, persuasion, pressure or compulsion, will always be received in the light of the individual’s own experience and perspectives. If they are to change the possibilities for learning, the influences must be convincing on this basis, i.e. the adults must accept them psychologically, and must be brought to see the meaning with the education programme in question for themselves and their situation.

Learning capacity

Whereas the questions of the specific character of adult learning in general have almost been neglected by learning psychology as well as by adult education research, there is an ongoing, important discussion concerning adults’ possibilities for learning, especially in the cognitive area.

The cognitive learning theory put forward by Jean Piaget in the 1930s, on the basis of extensive empirical studies, focuses on the development of learning possibilities in childhood through a number of given cognitive stages and sub-stages and thus maintains that there is a highly specific developmental course. But this structural development ends when a child at the age of 11 to 13 reaches the ‘for-mal operational’ level, which makes logical-deductive thinking possible as a supplement to the forms of thinking and learning acquired at earlier stages (see Flavell 1963).

However, Piaget’s perception of this has been questioned from several quarters. On the one hand, ithas been pointed out that not all adults are actually able to think ‘formal operationally’ in the logical sense inherent in Piaget’s definition (see Sutherland this volume). Empirical research points out that in England it is actually less than 30 per cent, but at the same time it confirms that at the beginning of puberty a decisive development takes place in the possibilities for learning and thinking in abstract terms, so that, all in all, distinguishing a new cognitive phase is justified (Shayer and Adey 1981). On the other hand, ithas been maintained that, at a later time, significant new cognitive possibilities that extend beyond the formally operative may develop (e.g. Commons et al. 1984). American adult education researcher Stephen Brookfield has summarized this criticism by pointing out four possibilities for learning which, in his opinion, are only developed in the course of adulthood: the capacity for dialectical thinking, the capacity for applying practical logic, the capacity for realizing how one may know what one knows (metacognition), and the capacity for critical reflection (Brookfield 2000).

Recent brain research seems indirectly to support Brookfield’s claims. Whereas it is a well established understanding, psychologically as well as neurologically, that the brain matures for formal logical thinking in early puberty, evidence has been found that the brain centres of the frontal lobe that conduct such functions as rational planning, prioritization and making well-founded choices, do not mature until the late teenage years (Gogtay et al. 2004). This finding seems to provide some clarification of the differences between the capacity of formal logical and practical logical thinking and learning as well as between ordinary cognition and metacognition in adolescence and early adulthoo...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Perspectives on adult and lifelong learning
• Part II Institutions and issues for lifelong learning
• Part III Informal and community contexts for learning
• Index