The Learning Society in a Postmodern World: The Education Crisis

ISBN-13: 9780820468365 / Angielski / Miękka / 2004 / 362 str.

Steinberg, Shirley R.

Opis

Lifelong learning has become a key concern as the focus of educational policy has shifted from mass schooling toward the learning society. The shift started in the mid 1960s and early 1970s under the impetus of a group of writers and adult educators, gravitating around UNESCO, with a humanist philosophy and a leftist agenda. The vocabulary of that movement was appropriated in the 1990s by other interests with a very different performativist agenda emphasizing effectiveness and economic outcomes. This change of interest, described in the book, has signified the death of education. The Learning Society in a Postmodern World explores different theoretical resources to respond to this situation, mainly those that propose some restoration of an educated public or, to the contrary, individual self-creation, and uses the works of a broad range of philosophers and thinkers notably MacIntyre, Habermas, Foucault, Derrida, Rorty, and Baudrillard. In addition, it raises important questions about postmodern and poststructuralist responses to education in the postmodern world. Its comprehensiveness and historical background make it an essential textbook for theoretical courses in lifelong learning and in educational theory in general. A broad range of interests and subject matter make it important reading for educators, policy specialists, media specialists, researchers on the subject of lifelong learning and on the relation between education and the postmodern world, political theorists, philosophers, and philosophers of education."

Recenzje

«'The Postmodern Society in a Postmodern World' is a scholarly yet accessible work that adopts a critical attitude to the most pressing questions concerning the learning society. It is an original and tough-minded contribution to this significant and vexing subject - a work that is likely to become a standard in the literature.» (Prof. Michael A. Peters, Professor of Education, The University of Glasgow)
«One of the most striking features of educational policy and practice over the past decade has been the rise of lifelong learning. Yet there can be few ideas that stand more in need of careful analysis. This is exactly what Kenneth Wain provides in this book. He brings to his topic a depth of scholarship that charts the development of lifelong learning from lifelong education, drawing on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Jürgen Habermas, as well as a range of poststructuralist thinkers. Lifelong learning emerges as an element in globalisation, while the peculiarly postmodern nature of the term is revealed as a critical factor in the equivocations of policy. Anyone interested in the future of lifelong learning, and in its subtle redefining of the public sphere, has much to gain from this fascinating discussion.» (Dr Paul Standish, University of Dundee)

O autorze

The Author: Kenneth Wain is Professor of Education at the University of Malta, where he has also served as Dean. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy of education from the University of London, Great Britain. In addition to numerous articles in professional journals, he is the author of The Maltese National Curriculum: A Critical Evaluation, The Value Crisis, Philosophy of Lifelong Education, and Theories of Teaching.