Learning to Be

This chapter focuses on the report Learning to Be, published by UNESCO in 1972. The UNESCO interpretation of lifelong education was more French, more political and more idealistic than the parallel uses of the concept such as recurrent education. The chapter discusses the rationale behind the report and its main messages and situates it among the other literature on lifelong education at the time. It examines the main intellectual currents that influenced the report and the reactions it received. The chapter argues that the report was to some extent a French endeavour, infused by the French Enlightenment tradition, political claims of the Résistance, existentialism and other intellectual movements prevailing in France. However, towards the late 1960s many perceived a sense of crisis insofar as the unlimited belief in progress had dissipated, and the Faure Report identified not only a "crisis of education", but also a "crisis of authority" and of "international cooperation".