IMPORTANCE

In the last decade lifelong learning has assumed immense importance in the discourse and policies of international agencies, organisations and governments. An increasing number of governments have concluded that a lifelong approach to learning should be instituted and deployed as one of the main lines of attack on some of the major problems they see as needing to be addressed in the Twenty-First Century.  The deliberations of international agencies such as OECD and UNESCO and governments in Australia and elsewhere reveal a commitment to policies of learning across the lifespan. Today continued access to education and training for all a country's citizens is seen as an investment in the future, a pre-condition for economic advance, democracy, social cohesion, and personal growth.

There are a number of themes pertaining to lifelong learning running through the work of international agencies, national and state and governments.  These include: (1) the emergence of an awareness of the importance of the relationship between education policy and notions of the knowledge economy and the learning society; (2) an acceptance of the need for a new philosophy of education and training, with institutions of all kinds – formal and informal, traditional and alternative, public and private – having new roles and responsibilities for learning; (3) the necessity for ensuring that the foundations for lifelong learning are set in place for all citizens during the compulsory years of schooling; (4) the need to promote a multiple and coherent set of networks, links, pathways and articulations between schooling, work, further education and other agencies offering opportunities for learning across the lifespan; (5) the need to ensure that emphasis upon lifelong learning does not reinforce existing patterns of privilege and widen the existing gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged, simply on the basis of access to education (OECD 1996). These themes have provided a strategic agenda for the work of the Centre for Lifelong Learning at ACU National.