LLinE Lifelong Learning in Europe

Editorial by Peter Jarvis: Learning generations

It has been a feature of LLinE that we have frequently carried an interview with a well known person in the field of adult education and lifelong learning: this issue is no exception. Dušan Savićević is our subject. Dušan has been very well known in Europe for many years – even before Yugoslavia was broken up his work was known through the Andragogy Institute in Zagreb. He has written many books on andragogy and in many ways he has helped popularise the study in Central and Eastern Europe. However, he is also indirectly responsible for its popularity in the USA because he taught Malcolm Knowles the term ‘andragogy’. Knowles never understood its meaning in the same way as did Dušan – for Dušan it is an academic discipline but for Malcolm it was as much a field of practice. Perhaps this difference is fundamental to the difference between the two cultures, but it does also raise a significant question about the nature of science. As a field of practice we can have a philosophy of andragogy and we may also have a sociology of andragogy – but we cannot have an andragogy of philosophy or of sociology! Consequently, the cultural difference actually reflects a profound difference in conception not only of the term but of the concept of science itself.

We are also printing a number of other papers upon which it is necessary to focus our attention carefully. For instance, there is a real sense in which Stephen Murgatroyd’s paper raises significant questions about the place of lifelong learning in contemporary society – he writes about jurisdictional advantage – he is concerned with instrumentality in lifelong learning – something that the British research councils are currently involved in by suggesting that research funding should be geared towards projects having a practical outcome rather than ‘blue skies’ research. Naturally, scholars are questioning this! It seems that it is easy to get imprisoned in the ‘common sense’ of instrumental rationality, and we have to get outside of the box and begin to ask questions about why are we engaging in all this research?

Naturally in an ageing society – perhaps one that needs to be transformed - the concerns of age difference are going to become even more significant. Hanna Salminen focuses on older nurses and on the issues of development, job satisfaction and organisational commitment. As we age we either grow more independent and we feel that we know what we need to do in different situations or we feel imprisoned by the rules and regulations of the organisation. Many years ago this researcher actually looked at a similar question for ordained clergy and discovered that those who were more committed to the bureaucratic procedures of the church had higher job satisfaction – but those who were regarded as more professional practitioners had lower job satisfaction and greater role strain. We are now beginning to see similar things with university staff and the question Salminen’s paper raises is whether age performs a similar function: Salminen is also suggesting that the level of job satisfaction depends also on the way that the older workers are perceived. Perhaps managers have major lessons to learn about older workers. Staff recruiters certainly need to change their perceptions, as the Mature@EU project on recruiting older workers discovered. Many organisations are discovering that older workers give excellent service and there are some companies that now insist that a percentage of their work force must have already retired once! Staff recruiters have to understand the major differences between recruiting the old and the young as the paper on this topic indicates. And as the Italian project suggests – things have also changed drastically for the young, and their expectations of work differs greatly from the older workers.

The relationship between family structure, the level of welfare in a society and the place of women both in the family and in adult education is the focus of a paper from Greece. There is an important relationship between the type of family structure and women’s participation in adult education – the more traditional the family the lower the participation. Such a conclusion raises as many questions as it answers, and the challenge of a paper like that is responding to the findings and seeing their implications in a wider context.

One lesson teachers are never too old to learn time and again is that teaching is also an opportunity to learn. Indeed, in the experience of this writer, teaching is one of the ways that we actually learn best and this is both in the preparation and delivery of the material and also in interacting with the students. Genuine teaching always involves interaction, and the picture of the professor on his dais or behind his desk far removed from the learners is common, but it points to the needs that we as teachers have to learn from the learners. As Freire once wrote, there is a teacher/learner – learner/teacher relationship in all teaching. Not only have we to cross a cultural divide when we teach, we often have to cross an age-divide. This is also very significant, and the ageing society has to be transformed into a learning one.

As we bring this issue to press, LLinE has seen considerable changes in its editorial staff. We wish Heidi Kivekäs well as she embarks on her work in Vietnam and we welcome the new managing editor, Markus Palmén, join the team and bring his own talents to the future of the journal.


Peter Jarvis
University of Surrey, UK