Lifelong learning is a term that’s largely faded into the background of education policy, but it still has a powerful influence on the way we think about learning provision.

Do you think of yourself as a lifelong learner?

Whether you do or you don’t, I’d love to hear what that concept means to you. Please take a moment to do this quick survey (approx 3-5 minutes):

What do we mean when we say “lifelong learning”?

Lifelong learning was conceived as a grand humanist project enabling all citizens, particularly the educationally disadvantaged, to become and to participate as agentic subjects in democratic society. But today it’s most commonly invoked in service of skills development for continued employability.

From the Australian Government’s National Statement of Commitment to Transform Education, released in late 2022:

It’s true this statement doesn’t focus on employability. Instead it uses the language of skills: skill needs, upskilling, reskilling. So much of this rhetoric carefully avoids emphasising actual work (the quote above quietly nods to economic challenges) but remains engineered to an essential vision in which skills can be rapidly learned and deployed as needed. It’s very important to recognise that “skills” here does not simply mean “what a person is capable of”. It has very deliberately become atomised into categories of things a person can be made to do.

This focus has been described by more radical critics as a skills fetish that positions skills as tradable commodities, rather than as qualities of the human beings we educate. Put another way: a person is a vessel for the skills (commodities) they have acquired. Industries and governments, then, employ the skills, not the people.

This is, of course, a gross perversion of the reality of our experience on the ground. I’ve never had a boss or a teacher who saw me as my skills rather than as a whole human being. But zooming out to a policy level, where individual human relationships give way to metrics and resource budgets, this is how the playing field begins to appear.

The OECD says lifelong learners are are poised to “succeed in labour markets … in a fast-changing and uncertain world”. They’ll have 100-year careers made up of not one but many professions as industries evolve. They’ll always need to be ready for the future of work.

What does this mean for education policy, strategy and practice? It means that at the micro level, we are constantly defending against attacks on grounds that tertiary education has become a cynical exercise in commodification. That’s not the way we work, of course — we don’t think of our students as “vessels”! — but it is, undeniably now, the system we work within. Educational funding models target skills shortages. Equity programs like the Job-ready Graduates Package aim to connect underrepresented groups with access to the forms of education that will address those shortages.

I think that a reclamation of lifelong learning is a key to undoing this cynicism. Why? Because right now, the term is bound to the discourse of skills. It doesn’t need to be. In fact, I don’t think many of the people who “do” lifelong learning think of it this way at all.

The traditional western model of education was front-loaded and formal, involving a significant upfront investment in schooling. This period of life would constitute a brief, early window in which a person acquired the level of education that would determine their position in society: college graduates to the professions, apprentices to the trades, and direct school leavers to various low-paid jobs requiring minimal training. If a person’s education ends here, a major aspect of their identity and status in the world becomes fixed for life.

Lifelong learning challenges and disrupts this model. It proffers a range of educational access points at various times of life. Various financial and temporal barriers are disrupted, enabling wider, longer and more flexible education pathways — and with them, social, cultural and economic possibilities — throughout life.

The question is how and why people then engage in such pathways. And, of course, who engages in them. What does lifelong learning actually look like?