Lifelong Learning in a Market Economy: Education, Training and the Citizen-Consumer

Abstract

Australian public policy adopted the concept of lifelong learning in the 1980s and harnessed it to human capital theory to articulate a new policy emphasis on ‘up-skilling’ the Australian labour force. This paper addresses the question of how this conception of lifelong learning has fared in practice as Australian Commonwealth government policies, including those related to education and training, have shifted to embrace strong market orientations and priorities. Have the policy objectives of a more highly trained labour force been met or has the concept of lifelong learning become increasingly uncoupled from links with the nation-building exercise of preparing Australia for the ‘information age’?