The Situation in a Nutshell

Contemporary discourse in LLL has shifted over the last 40 years from a humanistic orientation as exemplified by UNESCO to a more economistic orientation rooted in neoliberal and global corporate capitalist culture and promoted by such international organizations as the WB, OECD and EU. These orientations target different goals for LLL, contain different assumptions and construct reality in different ways. Academia has been critical of this shift: even antagonistic. Some of the key criticisms can be summarized in this way:

·         LLL is being associated with a narrow economic focus which ignores or minimizes social and political concerns;

·         It is associated with a constrained vision of education, learning, and the labour market.

·         Through the construction of specific subjectivities, it is implicated as a technology of governmentality whereby individuals are conditioned to be self-governing in the interests of the substructure;

·         It contributes to social division, exclusion and inequity;

·         It unfairly assigns burdens of responsibility and risk to the individual.

In spite of the critic, the economistic orientation is persistent and dominant.  Reasons suggested for its success include the fact that alternative humanistic orientations have been vague and impractical. Additionally, LLL acts as a strategy toward an end and not a policy open for questioning. Furthermore, it is rooted in a strongly constructed imaginary that is taken for granted.  Finally, but perhaps most importantly, it is promoted and supported by powerful international organizations and special interest groups such as the European Roundtable of Industrialists who represent the core substructure that controls the media, technology and capital that run through the superstructures and contribute to policy and practices that benefit the core.

Scholarly discourse has thus far focused on antagonistic critique. It identifies that conceptualizations of LLL other than the economistic exist, but it still has a tendency to construct a dichotomy of positions between the first and second generation conceptualizations. What it has so far inadequately done is engage productively with each conceptualization and explore ways in which an integrated approach to LLL can be conceived. I suggest that scholars must choose to abandon the conflicting dichotomy of economistic versus humanistic perspectives and learn to speak the language of the economists so that they can engage in productive explorations aimed at constructing an integrated vision of LLL. I further suggest that the state has a crucial (if not difficult) role in this process not only as structural and resource distributor, but also as facilitator and arbitrator.