apologies

I'm posting apologies for not posting a posting today.
But in doing so, I AM posting aren't I?

GRIN

I've been buried in studying for my comprehensive exams.
and thinking
always thinking!

I will give the briefest of descriptions today of what I've been considering.

In the 1960s and 1970s, LLL (called LLEducation, for the most part back then) started to take off.  It was best exemplified by the 1972 Faure Report out of UNESCO.  The vision that UNESCO had was very progressive and humanitarian:  it sought no less than the complete fulfillment of mankind!

Good looking machine, Orville, but do you think it will fly?

The vision was, according to many pundits, beautiful.  But it has been critiqued as vague, Utopian, and impractical.   So, although the vision hasn't gone away and UNESCO has similar visions today, it hasn't fared as "well" as another vision of LLL that started to develop in the 1980s and 1990s.

You remember those days?  Reagan, Thatcher, Neoliberal birth.  Economic "crisis", high unemployment....all that stuff.   International organizations such as the World Bank, OECD and European Union started to pay attention to education and LLL within a neoliberal and human capital theory framework.  This vision of LLL has become the dominant vision of LLL.  

What I've been doing recently is looking at the criticisms of this dominant flavour of LLL.  There are many.  Critics have been vocal.  But what could be wrong with LLL? you might ask.   In a nutshell, the major complaints aren't about LLL per se, but around a Neoliberal global capitalist framing of it.  Generally, it is argued that it front stages the economic at the expense of the social, it is a form of social control manipulating people to be and behave in certain ways that benefit capital, it is overly focused on narrow views of learning, learners, work and knowledge that marginalize other valuable versions, and that it fails to address systemic inequities (and in some cases even exacerbates them!).

What I'm looking at right now is this:  If this vision of LLL is so terrible, how has it become dominant?  And what other directions are possible? 


In two days i should be able to post another short summary of what I'm starting to think about these last two questions.   I'd love to hear your comments! 

in the meantime, back to a little more LLL for me!