Adult Education and the ‘Learning’ Turn

In the 1990s, the terms ‘adult education’ and ‘lifelong education’ began to be displaced by a novel discourse of ‘lifelong learning’. This learning turn in education policy affirmed ‘learning as performance’ but also discounted the established world of adult and lifelong self-development. In that moment, the meanings of ‘adult education’, ‘lifelong learning’ and ‘lifelong education’ became unclear. But what is being entangled here and with what effects on knowing and doing adult education? I use the concept of ‘analytic borderlands’ to understand change in global transitions and report on research that traced the learning turn in Australian adult education through three different historical contexts. Re-reading empirical case study research, I show how these historical contexts intersected in ways that transformed publicly provided Technical and Further Education (TAFE) into mixed economy Vocational Education and Training (VET). I argue that these three concepts of ‘lifelong learning’, ‘adult education’ and ‘lifelong education’ are historically specific forms of more general political rationalities, institutionalised spaces and necessary utopias.