Permeability

From Lifelong Education to Lifelong Learning

In order to understand the importance of permeability, it is helpful to look at history: Long before the concept of lifelong learning, issues of adult education have been addressed. As early as 1926 Eduard Lindman claimed in a visionary book that adult education…

• …is life itself. Today we might say working is learning and vice versa.
• ...should not just be vocational but be organized around “non-vocational ideals”. Today we talk about wider competences and holistic job profiles.
• …should start with situations and not with subjects. Today we focus on business process and use these to structure learning content. This thesis is also reflected in a competence-orientation as opposed to a knowledge-orientation.
• …must use the learner’s experience. This possibility, then, is the result of “permeability” between learning contexts.

The UNESCO made lifelong education a central organizing idea in 1970 boosting the concept. This created awareness of the issue and led to many ramifications. One, in the discussion today, is that education and learning are considered not the same as learning takes place in all sort of non-formal contexts and even incidentally, “en passant”.

The importance of informal learning is now increasingly acknowledged and the term “lifelong learning” preferred. The challenge in the attempt to foster permeability is to incorporate the highly individualized nature of lifelong learning in increasingly less traditional and less static contexts that require a high degree of self-direction.