Reviews: Lifelong Learning: Concepts and Contexts, Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order, Meeting Basic Learning Needs in the Informal Sector: Integrating Education and Training for Decent Work, Empowerment and Citizenship, Class Concerns: Adult Education and Social Class, Recruitment, Retention and Retirement in Higher Education: Building and Managing the Faculty of the Future, Perspectives on Distance Education: Lifelong Learning and Distance Higher Education, Widening Participation: Which Way

Abstract

Lifelong learning', Peter Jarvis tells us in his Foreword to the substantial Sutherland-Crowther reader on the subject, 'is an ambiguous concept used in a variety of ways, and has a complex history within the field of education.' He differentiates two varieties in particular, which he calls 'educational' and 'learning'. The former term 'emerged from the idea of adult education'; the learning approach is more recent, but Jarvis notes the paucity of studies comparing children's with adult or third-age learning, and of comparisons between classroom and informal learning settings such as social living. As a result, 'studies of the learning process that span adulthood' tend 'to be regarded as theories of lifelong learning' (pp xiv-xv). Two of the three longer books in this group explicitly address lifelong learning in their titles; the third refers to basic learning needs in the informal sector, a sector commonly seen as the preserve of adult and community education. The fourth, much shorter, volume is a well structured and well presented study guide concerned with social class and adult education. It takes the form of nine 10-page essays in the Jossey-Bass 'New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education' series. Its editor, Tom Nesbit of Simon Fraser University, is not of the often class-innocent US persuasion. In general, social class is a British preoccupation, well shared by the adult education 'community'. Adult educators are gender-sensitive on both sides of the Atlantic, but in the United States race tends to displace class among the central equity preoccupations. Nesbit's contributors are well chosen to represent the global village-from local UBC colleague Kjell Rubenson, through Lyn Tett in Scotland and Janice Malcolm in England to Griff Foley in Australia, Shirley Walters in South Africa and back to Chicago and Toronto. More to the point, the contributors read like a Who's Who of Reviews