LIFE-LONG LEARNING AND ADULT ONLINE EDUCATION

Life-Long Learning and adult online education

Life-Long Learning and adult online education

Introduction

Focusing on recent trends in Chinese Taipei, this paper analyzes ways in which adult education policies may be used to establish a successful and permanent foundation for lifelong learning. First, political, social, and educational dimensions of life in Chinese Taipei are examined, highlighting a major weakness in the field of adult education due to little or unproductive collaboration between providers (Winch, 1998). Next, the government's adult education policies are analyzed, focusing on 1992's Five Year Scheme, which laid the foundation for raising the standards of adult educational practices and lifelong learning; 1996's Lifelong Learning Oriented Middle Stage Adult Education Development Scheme, emphasizing programming and implementation of the Five Year Scheme; and Whole Construction of Community, a cultural policy package designed to establish a systematic learning society in the country(Prosser, 1999). The following four strategies to strengthen adult education are then presented: (1) bridge the gap between policy and practice by developing a needs assessment tool to determine present demands and reveal future trends; (2) increase multiple participation in policy making by involving participants, providers, and other government departments; (3) balance descriptive and prescriptive demands; and (4) improve program evaluation through multiple, inter-, and intra-departmental assessment(Cropley, 2009). Finally, adult education and lifelong learning in Chinese Taipei and other economies are discussed.

Discussion

The concept of lifelong learning can be viewed as originating in the Faure (UNESCO, 1972) report, though its actual conceptual heart is the notion of lifelong education and the vision of a learning society. The UNESCO position saw “lifelong education as involving a fundamental transformation of society, so that the whole of society becomes a learning resource for each individual” (Cropley, 2009). Philosophically, this position envisaged the society of the future as a scientific humanist learning society in which all citizens would participate fully. Despite its humanistic origins, the concept of lifelong education received wide criticism and rejection from many educational theorists in the 1970s and receded somewhat into the background (Beckett, 2002). However, since the 1990s it has returned to favour as lifelong learning because, amongst other things, it sits well with OECD neo-liberal economic agendas. As Boshier (1998) put it:

There has been a shift from a neo-Marxist or anarchistic-utopian template for reform (the Faure report) to a neo-liberal, functionalist rendition (OECD) orchestrated as a corollary of globalisation and hyper capitalism.

Inevitably, the OECD take on ...