Lifelong learning in a market economy: Education, training and the citizen-consumer.

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'?

Keywords

education work relationship

educational policy

educational change

knowledge economy

economic impact

recurrent education

Introduction

The concept of lifelong learning still draws much of its rhetorical strength from the modernist and progressive elements that link education to economic development through human-capital theory (OECD, 1996) and to personal and social or 'civil' actualisation through liberal educational philosophy (Delores, 1996). However, in reality, the notion of lifelong learning has moved to embrace market orientations that place the individual learner not so much within a strong civil society as within an economic environment in which he or she must take responsibility for a whole new range of economic imperatives and choices. Following Rose (1996, p. 327) we take the view that the learning society concept, upon which terms such as 'lifelong learning' and 'knowledge nation' draw their strength, has become part of a wider discursive formation that privileges an 'individuation of society'. This positions individuals as the bearers of risk and responsibility. It effectively shifts perceptions of individuals' relationships vis-a-vis the wider society away from that of individuals as citizens with citizen rights to that of individuals as consumers with consumer rights.

From this perspective, learning becomes the primary strategy that individuals can mobilise to manage risk and responsibility both at work and in other parts of their social and cultural life. Individuals participate in society less as 'active citizens,' through political and other social institutions, and more as active consumers who are constantly marketing their 'self'. This is a form of agency in which:

   [T]he individual [is] to conduct his or her life, and that of his
   or her family, as a kind of enterprise, seeking to enhance and
   capitalize on existence itself through calculated acts and
   investments (Rose, 1999, p. 164).

This is a shift in both discursive location and actual ways of being. It fuels, for example, a shift in the nature of knowledge required by learners. Priority is given to the development of informal 'knowledgeability' (know-how) over the deep expertise (knowledge of structure and relationship--the know-what and know why) that traditionally accompanied the formation of an educated person. It is also a shift away from the collectivist idea of citizenship to the individualised practice of the consumer.

How has this shift come about? In this paper we attempt to trace something of the history of this movement by examining the emergence and development of the lifelong learning concept in Australian public policy. This is not a comprehensive history. It is an attempt at what Rose (1999, p. 58) describes as a 'diagnostic approach' to sociological inquiry in which the aim is to 'make the given once more strange and to cause us to wonder at how it came to appear so natural'.

Changing metaphors of the learning society

Sleepers wake!

In the early 1980s, Labor politician, Barry Jones, published a book called Sleepers Wake (Jones, 1983) in which he argued that the new information and communication technologies (ICT) presented a significant challenge to Australia. In particular, computer and communications technologies had the potential to increase inequalities because people's access was dependent on their ability to buy relevant equipment. Describing this division of the 'information-rich' and 'information poor', Jones argued for government to support universal access to ICT. This 'wake-up call' was presented as an additional issue that should be addressed within Australia's established institutional regime. Its potential to destabilise those institutional arrangements was not emphasised to a significant degree, except via its impact on inequality. Informational inequality would undercut the traditional 'fair go' for all Australian citizens.

Clever country

Between 1983 and 1996, the federal Labor government oversaw a substantial re-working of public policy and institutional arrangements. Building on a consensus-based accord with unions and employers, the Commonwealth advanced a radical macro- and micro-economic reform agenda aimed at positioning Australia to meet the challenges of increased international competition. The framework for this wide-reaching reform agenda was articulated through Australia Reconstructed (Australian Council of Trade Unions/Trade Development Council, 1987), the report of a joint government-union mission that investigated the economic management strategies being developed in small to medium western European countries. This initiative, driven by the labour movement, aimed at protecting employees in a rapidly changing economy. Its recommendations emphasised, amongst other things, the development of an active labour market policy to facilitate economic restructuring, support for individuals caught in the fall-out from changes in industry, and the reform of education and training to support skill formation.

These reforms were seen as ways of increasing people's opportunities and choices, irrespective of their achievements in their initial schooling or changes in the employment situation. Opening up opportunities for individuals to learn and to gain recognition for that learning across their life course would allow career mobility even when the individual had left school early or had poor early learning experiences. The objective was skill formation to build an internationally competitive workforce in Australia. The goal was creating a 'Clever Country'--a goal that the then Minister for Education, John Dawkins saw as being brought into being through a reform of the purposes, objectives and priorities of schooling (Dawkins, 1990).

Lifelong learning

The Clever Country metaphor captured the Labor government's new emphasis on structural reform in education and training in order to more closely meet the needs of a restructuring economy. The lifelong learning policy agenda also grew out of this new emphasis on the relationship between education, training and a restructured labour market (Axford & Moyes, 2003; Watson, 2003) This new agenda linked lifelong learning to human capital theory--the notion that credentialled education and training built up an individual's capital that could be transacted in the labour market.

From the early 1990s, this link was put under strain as the lifelong learning agenda became increasingly tied to a more market-oriented political agenda that saw learning as a personal investment that returned private benefits to individuals via increased earnings (Marginson, 1997). In this sense, the lifelong learning policy agenda helped shift the focus of reform away from workerist notions of skill formation to agendas that emphasised 'choice and markets' and privatisation in education. This trajectory was advanced by the federal Labor government, particularly in the vocational education and training sector (VET), through the 'competencies' movement (Collins, 1993; Jackson, 1993) and, in higher education, through the introduction of service charges in universities and later the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). It was driven even more aggressively across all sectors of education and training by pro free-market Liberal-National Party governments at state levels and, after the 1996 election, federally. In fact, it is possible to identify at least four separate policy trajectories that emerged during the 1990s that drew on the lifelong learning concept.

Reskilling The first of these trajectories--that aimed at reskilling the Australian workforce--was clearly articulated in the early part of the decade. The reskilling agenda took in a wide range of curriculum and social policy matters. It included the introduction of competency-based curriculum in VET and generic skills programs in schools and universities; encouraging school retention by cutting out unemployment benefits to under eighteen year olds and providing study assistance instead; funding for 'computers in schools' programs and for ICT-based 'flexible delivery' inVET and universities; and more cross-institutional course provision (for example, VET in schools programs) and assessment facilitated by a national recognition and qualification framework embracing all learning sectors.

Choice and markets The second set of policies--those directed at shifting the cost of education and training from the public to the private domain--were set in train by the federal Labor government by the establishment of a training market in VET and the introduction of HECS fees in higher education. Since 1996, under a Coalition government, these policies have been extended into schools education with a considerable increase in Commonwealth assistance to private schools. In 1999, for example, the Coalition government introduced a new funding system--the socio-economic-status-based scheme--that provided additional funding to private schools, with significant increases in grants to independent schools (Watson, 2004). At the same time, there has been a massive expansion of the international market in Australian education and training places and the growth of a sizeable commodity market in higher education services delivered both in Australian campuses and, increasingly, at 'off-shore' sites in the Asian and Pacific region. The growth of the international education market in Australia has been phenomenal. Considine, Marginson, Sheenan, and Kumnick (2001, p. 20) report that in Australian universities:

   Between 1990 and 1995 domestic student load grew by 19.2 per cent,
   while international student load grew by 78.6 per cent. Between
   1995 and 2000, the gap between the trend lines widened. Domestic
   student load grew by 9.9 per cent (... and actually fell in 2000),
   while international student load grew by an extraordinary 137.1 per
   cent in this five-year period.

International students tend to be studying in a narrow band of discipline areas--in particular, business studies and computing. Considine et al. go on to show that considerable revenue from the fees paid by these students is spent on nonacademic functions, including meeting the costs of recruiting these students in a competitive market. Consequently, much of the increased income generated by this new education market does not go to supporting the full range of university teaching and research functions but into:

   [T]he corporate functions of universities, including off-shore
   operations, marketing, public relations, IT and communications,
   asset management, quality assurance, alumni fundraising and so on
   (Considine et al., 2001, p. 27).

The rapid expansion of the international education market provides a good illustration of how the 'choice and markets' agenda has significantly shifted the cost of education away from the public purse. But in doing so it has also, perhaps inadvertently, undercut the ability of these public institutions to support a diverse and varied range of teaching and research roles and helped consolidate the shift towards the culture of 'knowledability' we alluded to earlier. In this sense, the expansion of education markets--although rhetorically linked to notions of lifelong learning--acted as a brake on the earlier policy formulation of lifelong learning as an opportunity to address the equity issues arising from technological change and labour market restructuring. The demands of these 'education markets' increasingly structured who had access to opportunities for lifelong learning, what kind of courses were on offer, and at what price.

Structural reform A third set of policies was directed at structural reform of the education and training sector: the purpose of reform in this domain has been to change management structures away from the bureaucratic structures and cultures that characterised public administration in the more modern period and move them toward corporate governance structures. At the level of public schools this trajectory is reflected in school-based management programs and global budgeting (Lingard, 2000). These initiatives transformed, in particular, the role of school principals, giving them more power but also more responsibility and accountability. At the post-school levels this trajectory has seen a major restructuring of the higher education and training sector, with significant changes in governance and organisation procedures. This has led to the emergence of what Marginson and Considine (2000) refer to as the 'Enterprise University'. They point out that it has strengthened executive control in universities but, when combined with the new emphasis on privatisation, has paradoxically brought about a process of 'isomorphic closure' thorough which institutions with diverse histories are forced to 'choose from an increasingly restricted menu of commercial options and strategies' (Marginson & Considine, 2000, p. 4). As with the marketisation of education and training, these changes acted as structural brakes to more equitable participation in the 'knowledge society' in that they helped structure who could access education and training, when, how, and at what price.

Infrastructure provision A fourth set of policies that drew on the lifelong learning theme attempted to address the issue that Barry Jones drew attention to in Sleepers Wake: provision and access to ICT infrastructure. The provision of ICT infrastructure to education and training institutions has involved major shifts in resource outlays by individual institutions (and has had a significant impact on other resource expenditure--especially staffing). In addition, the struggle over ownership of ICT delivery systems has been a major political issue and one of the main sites of contestation in Australia. For example, the corporatisation and sale of the once wholly publicly-owned postal and telephone utility provided--and is still providing--one of the starkest sites of political division. Although this 'government monopoly' has been broken up and its component parts corporatised for over a decade, debate over the full-privatisation of the main communications carrier Telstra continues. Similarly, the struggle over control of infrastructure provision in education and training remains a major policy issue (see, for example, Department of Education, Training & Youth Affairs, 2000). As with the marketisation of education and training, these political struggles over ICT infrastructure had structural implications for the institutions that deliver education and training--and, in turn, on who could access which courses, when, how, and at what price.

Learning communities

The policy trajectories outlined above represent 'bundles' of issues that have changed shape since the early 1990s. This partly reflects the dynamic nature of social and economic change, and also changing policy assumptions and orientations. In the late 1980s and early 1990s fears of massive rises in unemployment as manufacturing collapsed under the pressure of global competition drove the policy agenda and encouraged the view that to survive economically Australia would need to train more 'symbolic analysts' (Reich, 1991). With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that these policy assumptions have not been borne out in quite the way anticipated in the late 1980s. The economy has restructured but, as we show below, the decline of manufacturing as a domain of employment growth has been accompanied by a rise in employment in the emerging service economy. Inequalities have grown, but within a context of overall strong economic growth.

At the same time, by the late 1990s evidence was gathered to show that the impact of education and training reform on participation was something of a mixed bag (Dussledorp Skills Forum, 1998, 1999). While the reforms had undoubtedly increased overall access to education and training, some groups had been better served than others. For example, the reform of VET had seen an increase in mature aged participation relative to youth participation. However, a substantial number of young people appeared to have fallen through the cracks between education, training and employment. It was estimated that fifteen per cent of fifteen to nineteen year olds and between twenty-one and twenty-five per cent of twenty to twenty-four year olds were marginal to both work and learning. Further research showed that learners in metropolitan areas were better served than those in rural and remote areas (Teese, 2000). In some country areas, poor participation in learning was compounded by the erosion of employment opportunities (through the restructuring of both companies and government employment) leading to demographic imbalances as young people migrated to the cities or persisted in situations marked by serious social disadvantage (Vinson, 2004). The electoral implications of these trends were illustrated in Victoria when, through the late 1990s, country electorates turned on the incumbent conservative state government, electing independents and, in 1999, tipping the conservatives from office.

Such developments had driven a set of policies, at state and federal levels, that aimed to tackle the problems of social exclusion, rebuild social capital and support community capacity-building. For example, the federal Labor government had instituted a funding scheme, the Australian Student Traineeship Foundation (ASTF), which allowed it to distribute Commonwealth funds to support school-industry partnerships that would enhance learning and employment opportunities for young people. This scheme was made necessary by the constitutional division of powers that vest responsibility for schools education and VET in the states. Federal governments are adept at relaying funds tied to Commonwealth priorities to education and training providers in states, through third agencies such as the ASTE With the change of federal government in 1996, the ASTF scheme was maintained but its name changed to the Employment and Careers Education Foundation. It continued to build local partnerships across the country that supported work experience and work-based learning. There is much positive feedback from this and equivalent state-based partnership initiatives such as the Local Learning and Employment Networks in Victoria (Department of Education and Training, 2002; Seddon & Billett, 2003), especially at the local level. Participants acknowledge that partnerships are hard work but they create opportunities for different interests to work together in ways that support young people and this is valued as a way of supporting one another and helping to rebuild community relationships.

The concept of 'social capital' has been important in policies aimed at building learning communities (Kilpatrick, Barrett, & Jones, 2003; Kilpatrick, Field & Falk, 2001). A study of learning communities in regional areas endorsed the view that, at local levels, individuals are willing to work together to support one another and that this kind of relationship building can have positive spin offs in both individual learning, community regeneration and industry development (Balatti & Falk, 2000). These themes have been taken up by Commonwealth, state and local governments to support regional development agendas that link education and training, and industry and community development. It has also encouraged 'joined-up' government initiatives that seek to look across policy portfolios so that service delivery can be orchestrated in a more co-ordinated and seamless way within regions. In Victoria, for example, a new cross-portfolio Department of Victorian Communities (2004) has recently been established to promote such coordination across seven separate ministries, including health, education, and sport and recreation.

A re-spatialised education system?

These developments are now generating a range of complex and highly localised effects that often do attend to the specificities of regional needs, although these outcomes are significantly shaped by local politics and relations with central government agencies. They contribute to the idea that knowledge and learning are important if communities are to become economically and socially sustainable through entrepreneurial activity. While the focus of these initiatives are generally not on the high knowledge end of the education spectrum, they help to generalise the idea that 'knowledge work', at least in the sense of being informally knowledgable, has some meaning in all aspects of life and in every community. These developments help to endorse the idea of communities made up of active learners who invest in and mobilise their learning assets as they pursue the goals they value (Sen, 1999), in and outside paid employment.

The various metaphors for 'learning community' extend and elaborate the main lifelong learning policy agenda in education and training to wider work and community contexts. Many of these elaborations have been advanced most aggressively in domains other than formal education sites and give the sense that the established institutional boundaries of education are being exploded. There is some validity in this in that there is a re-spatialisation of education and training under way--learning is being acknowledged, supported, and regulated in various ways, within time and space parameters that are, in some respects, different from those of the past (Seddon, 1998, 1999, 2000).

At the same time, however, these localised and particularised interpretations of the lifelong learning agenda are problematic in that they tend to dislocate that agenda away from the core formal institutions of education and training provision. Even so, these formal institutions remain central to the social organisation of learning because of their wide reach and their control of the credentialing processes. Schools remain a most socially significant domain because they serve virtually all children and adolescents. But schools also remain, of the three education and training sectors, the most regulated domain--being compulsory, subject to substantial government outlays and with well-established industrial frameworks. School education will therefore remain one of the main games even in the context of a marketised education and training system. At the same time, as federal and state governments have learned the hard way, vocational education cannot easily be left to 'market forces' without seriously compromising Australia's stock of skilled trade workers. Higher education has shown itself the most open to marketisation--but not without costs to the system's ability to ensure quality teaching and research, and breadth and diversity in its knowledge offerings. Radical changes to organisational structures have been achieved but these changes open new spaces for political contestation over the control of course offerings--especially to whom courses are to be offered, and at what cost--and over academics' work.

Change has brought new opportunities and new dilemmas to all three sectors of formal education. Control of teachers' and academics' work can be contested, and issues of access and diversity have become more problematic, especially in situations where large numbers of tenured staff are reaching retirement age.

Education and other 'lifeworlds'?

So far in this paper we have argued that lifelong learning has been a central policy construction that has carried forward a re-articulation of the role and purpose of education and training. However, apart from the now well-documented outcome of shifting the cost of education and training away from the public purse and on to students, what has the actual impact of this education agenda been?

Examining the outcomes of policy agendas is a particularly fraught business, not least because such agendas represent rhetorical constructions of real world change. There is no doubt that at an individual level the consequences of these symbolic and practical changes can be very mixed--ranging from individually destructive costs through to an exhilarating sense of agency and, superficially at least, empowerment. We do not wish, therefore, to suggest that the method we use here exhausts the ways of examining such an issue. We suggest, however, that despite the diversity of individual experience within the realities marked by lifelong learning rhetoric, there are systematic patterns of effects emerging for different social groups. What we present next provides some indicators of the systematic way the idea of lifelong learning and the 'knowledge economy' articulates with the actual rived experience of ordinary Australians. We start by looking at the changing nature of work because, in Australia, there has always been a strong structural link between levels of educational attainment and occupation location, occupational status, and levels of remuneration.

Knowledge work in the service economy

The lifelong learning metaphor suggests that a growing proportion of the workforce will be engaged in work that demands higher levels of knowledge and skills. But the evidence suggests that knowledge work is largely being talked up in Australia. Between the late 1970s and early 1990s, the Australian labour market underwent a period of transformation. The shifts were away from those occupational domains that epitomised 'modern' Australia: manufacturing, skilled trades, agricultural and mining. They were towards corporate services and personal services. The size and shape of these shifts is explored by Cully (1999) and Doyle, Kurth and Kerr (2000), among others. In the following discussion, we have drawn heavily on Doyle et al. because their employment categories better demonstrate the impact of the service economy on employment than the standard Australian Bureau of Statistics categories sometimes do. They better illustrate our point that there is a clear relationship between what types of education and training have found a ready 'market' and an increasingly fragmented and casualised service economy.

Doyle et al. (2000) demonstrate that from 1979 to 1996 the service sector in Australia grew in importance in employment terms while manufacturing, agriculture, and mining all declined (as areas of employment, not necessarily in terms of economic importance). They found:

The Farm (representing goods-producing extractive industries, including mining) decreased by fourteen per cent (from an already low base, jobs fell to 280,000).

The Factory (representing goods-producing industrial production) decreased by twenty-one per cent (to 1.2 million jobs).

The Counter (representing low-skilled services) increased by 111 per cent to 1.4 million jobs (this equates to over 750,000 new jobs in twenty years).

The Office (representing high-skilled technical services, management, coordination) increased by fifty-five per cent (to 3.3 million jobs).

The Hospital/Classroom (representing high-skilled services in health, education, law enforcement, firefighting) grew fifty-five per cent (to 1.1 million jobs).

(Doyle, Kurth & Kerr, 2000, pp. 3, 15)

These researchers also found that, by the end of the period, average earnings in the new service sectors varied greatly not only between occupational groups but also within them. For those in the 'office' category, for example, there was a difference of $18,000 between the average earnings of the highest earners (business professionals) and the lowest earners (clerical and support staff). At the same time, the average for the whole 'counter' work category was $17,800 in 1996 while the overall average of 'office' workers was almost double that at $32,400 (Doyle et al., 2000, p. 20).

They observed that the labour market had polarised over the period:

   The 'forty hour week for all' is being polarised--into high paying,
   high education, knowledge working, long hours jobs and low paying,
   low education, service oriented, part-time jobs. The former are
   mostly found in the Office, the latter are mostly found in the
   Counter. (Doyle et al., 2000, p. 54)

Gender differentiation is also stark. Looking just at workers in the middle of their careers, that is, aged thirty to fifty-nine, Doyle et al. (2000, p. 21) found that the patterns of employment change for males over the period under review was similar to that for the total workforce--with marked falls in 'factory' from thirty-five per cent to twenty-three per cent and a significant rise in 'office' from thirty-seven per cent to forty-four per cent. Labour market changes for women were not so clear-cut. In the 'hospital/classroom' sector, where many more women than men have traditionally been located, employment had stabilised by the early 1990s, after growth from eighteen per cent in 1979 to twenty-two per cent in 1996. Even here, much of the gain in graduate employment for young women in the early 1990s resulted from a category shift that inflated 'high-skilled; that is graduate, employment in 'hospital/classroom' as a consequence of nurse training being moved, in the late 1980s, from hospitals to universities (Andrews & Wu, 1998).Thus, much of the gain can be attributed to reclassification of nursing rather than a significant growth in the number of 'high skilled' jobs for women.

Women showed a greater increase than men in 'office' jobs up from thirty-eight per cent to forty-nine per cent but not necessarily at the highly paid business or managerial end of office work and, where women did make gains it was often from a smaller overall base. Cully (1999, p. 100), for example, points out that the growth in female managers in the period from 1993 to 1999 was double that of males, though there were still roughly four male managers for every female equivalent in 1999.

'Counter' work absorbed more women than men throughout the period, and much of the growth in the number of jobs in this sector was accounted for through growth in part-time work in this sector (Doyle et al., 2000, p. 22).

Overall, women in all employment sectors continue to be earning significantly less than males. By 1996, the earnings differences by gender remain as high as fifty-two per cent in 'elite' jobs; forty-eight per cent in 'good jobs' and sixty-seven per cent in 'less-skilled jobs' (Doyle, 2000, p. 51). This suggests that women are, in general, in less secure, lower paid, and less challenging work roles compared to men of equal qualifications and training in all sectors of the new economy and that women make up the bulk of low-paid personal and retail service providers.

These findings, particularly the increasing polarisation between the incomes of high-paid corporate service providers and low-paid personal and retail service providers, and the 'fracturing' of salary structures both between and within occupational domains is consistent with other Australian and overseas analyses of the impact of the growth of a service economy (Axford, 2002). It is also consistent with the other Australian studies that suggest that the emerging service economy is more polarising than the one it replaces. It is to this issue we turn our attention in the next section.

Learning and the world of work

Another study of changes in the nature of work adds weight to the view that the 'knowledge economy' is a mixed bag for workers and their families. Watson et al. (2003) observe that many economic indicators suggest that Australia has had a buoyant economy through the 1990s with strong economic growth, increased labour productivity, modest wage and salary increases and steady growth in employment. Yet many of these indicators are aggregates and averages that mask the particular impacts of economic changes. They note:

   The increase in labour productivity has given us increased economic
   prosperity without inflation, but it has been bought at the cost of
   increased work intensification and longer hours by a large
   proportion of the workforce. This increased stress at work has
   spilled over and created greater stress on households, particularly
   for families with children (Watson et al., 2003, p. 2).

In considering lifelong learning, these researchers show that there has been increased participation in learning accompanying the changes in work. From 1982 to 1992, Year Twelve school retention increased from thirty-six per cent to seventy-seven per cent, due, in part, to the collapse of the full-time youth labour market and the development of innovative education and training initiatives. Between 1985-86 and 1997-98, tertiary education participation increased by eighty-five per cent (from 282,359 to 521,783 equivalent full-time students). Enrolments of fifteen to sixty-four year olds in VET institutions increased from 8.4 per cent to 13.2 per cent between 1991 and 2000 and this increase was spread across all age groups (Watson, 2003, p. 155).

Yet while individuals have taken up the challenges of learning as suggested in the idea of a learning society, employers show much less commitment to skill formation. Between 1996 and 2002, employers spending on training increased from $2.5 billion to $4 billion, nationally. It represented an increase in real terms from $302 to $375 per head. This figure includes government subsidies (which increased over the period). Looking at employer contributions to training as a percentage of payroll shows that spending on training remained static at 1.3 per cent. Contribution to structured training fell from 1.7 per cent to 1.5 per cent of payroll (Watson, 2003, p. 158-9).

Watson et al. argue that changes in work and working life are marked by a tension between diversity and inequality. Many of the changes in working conditions offer individuals greater diversity and opportunities for tailoring their employment and income earning activities to their own personal circumstances. Yet realising these opportunities depends upon the kinds of resources that people can mobilise. Resource inequalities mean that there are inequalities in choices and in opportunities for exercising choice. The expansion of market regulation means that there is an increased domain in which individuals are expected to mobilise their own financial, social and cultural resources in order to pursue the choices that they value. It also means that inequalities in resources bite harder because most people are wage and salary earners subject to labour market inequalities. At the same time, because there has been a systematic rolling back of public services that mobilised individual's resources for collective projects serving all citizens--such as education, health, welfare--most low-income people are doubly disadvantaged: first in the labour market and again by the loss of the redistributive power of universal public goods and services.

Learning in a world of individuated choice

The idea of a society in which learning is central has emerged on the coat-tails of a wider policy agenda that seeks to shift the pattern of social organisation away from centralised state planning towards decentralised market regulation that demands active individuated responsiveness to risk and responsibility. As Michael Pusey notes, many Australians have known nothing other than 'economic rationalism':

   Anyone who turned forty with the new millennium will have spent all
   their adulthood living through what we so blithely call 'economic
   reform'. Everyone knows what it is: deregulation, privatisation,
   labour market reform, microeconomic reform, user pays, tax reform
   [Goods and Services Tax], cutting government spending, more
   competition, welfare reform and--the latest instalment--the
   creeping privatisation of Medicare and of the universities
   (Pusey, 2003a, p. 132).

In his study of the impact of economic reform on 'middle Australia', Pusey (2003b) argues that these economic reforms, introduced by a succession of Australian governments, have destabilised and undercut the familiar institutional arrangements that had been handed down from earlier generations and that structured social life in Australia. These reforms have re-engineered institutions that previously anchored individuals and their lifeworlds. Economic reform has led to structural changes in Australian society. These changes have overturned key features of the 'workingman's welfare state'--a basic wage sufficient to support a family, industry protection, and industrial relations that sought an equitable distribution of wealth. While some features of this social settlement have changed in positive ways endorsed by most Australians--such as increased women's labour market participation and greater economic independence--other features have had implications for the way people feel about themselves, their families and the way they manage their lives.

Pusey argues that changes in the organisation of work has reduced the duration of working life of many Australians. Where once many men entered the workforce at sixteen and left with a golden handshake at sixty-five, they are now subject to a far shorter period of earning. Young people's entry to the labour market (and to serious partnering) is delayed by extended education and training and the growth of insecure, poorly paid, part-time employment that can support youth consumption but not families. Older workers are squeezed out of the labour market earlier due to industry restructuring and prejudices against employment of older workers. The implication, Pusey argues, is that each individual has a reduced period of earning over their life course.

In addition, the family wage has been undercut by deregulation and employer arguments that, in a competitive context, they do not have the capacity to pay higher wages. This means that families can no longer depend upon a single family wage but, increasingly, require a double income. The need for a dual income is accentuated by the reduced duration of income earning capacity, and by the extended periods of childhood dependence (where children do not become independent until their twenties or even thirties) and aged dependence (where elderly parents must be supported by families because of cuts in social services). The family's income earning capacity is both shorter and yet must support a greater range of family costs that were previously provided as public services through the collective agency of the state.

Structural changes in the economy present individuals and families with significant cultural and moral dilemmas. Pusey captures these relationships diagrammatically (Figure 1).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

These structural changes create new dilemmas for individuals and families: how do women manage work and child rearing? What is required to secure a reasonable level of income after retirement? Who looks after aged parents when they are sick and increasingly frail? These structural and cultural shifts bring individuals and families face-to-face with new risks and responsibilities, and confront them with new choices. In this context individuals are advantaged when they acquire new knowledge that supports the increased demand for self-regulation. Learning throughout life becomes a necessity but what is privileged is information gathering to inform consumption choices and instrumental knowledge acquisition to serve specific learning needs--the need for such things as job skills and financial expertise to manage retirement.

From this perspective, lifelong learning can be seen to valorise informal knowledgeability rather than knowing as a form of self development or deep expertise. It creates the preconditions for the proliferation of support professionals who consult, advise and guide self-managing individuals as they negotiate the minutiae of rules and regulations governing social life. As Zuboff and Maxim, (2002) suggest, the individual need for knowledge support is a new frontier created by the changing context of social life and with potentially huge commercial implications. At the same time, this valorisation of individual knowledgeability downplays the impact on both individuals' life trajectories and the nation's skill-base of education, training and employment policies that lock increasing numbers of workers into casualised and deskilled sectors of the service economy. That is to say, the process of individualisation (with its emphasis on personal choice and individual management of 'risks' such as redundancy, health, illness, or old age) deflects questions about the political dimensions of these issues and governments' responsibilities to consider the equity implications of policy decisions.

Conclusion: between rhetoric and reality

This paper has considered the idea of lifelong learning as it has played out in Australian education and training policy over the past two decades. We have included in our analysis several Australian studies that extend beyond education and training to work and to work-life issues. This analysis suggests considerable complexity in the relationship between the idea that we are moving into an era in which knowledge and learning are paramount, and an economic and social reality in which work for many is becoming more routine, more casualised, and more oriented towards various forms of commercialised service delivery, while social life is becoming more individualised in terms of the management of risk.

Our analysis of Australian policy and practice demonstrates that education and training institutions remain as central to the distribution of social and economic goods as they were before 'marketisation' because they continue to structure access to the various sectors of the labour market. That labour market has undergone rapid change, characterised by increased fragmentation and polarisation. There has been a hollowing out of middle-level (and middle income) skilled and technical occupations. In the emerging corporate structures that are now the dominant occupational location of Australian workers, a few 'high skilled' workers are gaining entry into high-paid managerial and technical work while growing numbers are gaining entry into part-time or casualised work--often working alongside the high paid or in other ways providing services to them (in restaurants, shops and their homes).

At the same time, education and training policies help structure this labour market. For example, as part of the marketisation of education there has been a shift to student-funded higher education that has ensured that more young people are available for work in the personal service and casualised sectors of the labour market for much longer. These student-workers, along with women with child-care responsibilities and older workers, help fuel the demand for part-time and casual work. As Pusey's work demonstrates, these emerging economic structures bring with them new social and cultural choices as risk and responsibility is individualised. As a result, the social and cultural implications of this new service economy are far from clear.

The withdrawal of governments from the arena of social welfare--health, education, old age, unemployment--has exposed individuals, families, and communities to a whole new set of financial and life stresses. Lifelong learning is presented as the solution to the management of these. Better-informed consumers of health, education, financial planning services will, it is assumed, replace the former passive dependence on the state. Citizenship rights will be replaced by consumer rights. There are obvious access and equity questions involved in this shift. There are also questions about the cost to the human psyche from what Sennett (1998) calls 'the corrosion of character' that he sees as one of the 'personal consequences of work in the new capitalism'. Rising levels of insecurity place strains not just on individuals as workers but as family and community members. This, in turn, raises serious public health issues arising from psychological stress and disorder. These questions get to quite fundamental issues about the kind of society we wish Australia to be and to become. So far, in Australia, there has been very little discussion of the lifelong learning concept in terms of these wider social and cultural implications.

Yet the processes of riving these changes on a day-to-day level have drawn forth resistances. The 'learning communities' movement touched on above represent one form of these resistances--albeit with some indications of the contradictory forms such localised and particularised resistances can take. On a broader canvass, it is possible to detect a groundswell of public awareness of the moral and political limits of market solutions to social problems. Even when dispersed and fragmented, these resistances provide a basis for micro-political action that works within the legacies of old institutional arrangements to negotiate and re-work the new imperatives of lifelong learning and 'the entrepreneurial self'. As Bourdieu (1998) suggests, these micro-political resistances draw on resources from the old order, 'on old solidarities, on reserves of social capital that protect an entire portion of the present social order from falling into anomie'. They act as

   [F]orces of resistance to the establishment of the new order and can
   become subversive forces ... that, under the appearance of simply
   defending an order that has disappeared and its corresponding
   'privileges', will be able to resist the challenge only by working
   to invent and construct a new social order. One that will not have
   as its only law the pursuit of egoistic interests and the
   individual passion for profit and that will make room for
   collectives oriented towards the rational pursuit of ends
   collectively arrived at and collectively ratified.

That these contradictory developments are playing out in the education sector is well established. The growing body of research documenting the way teachers' and education managers' work is changing is testimony to this. We have not directly examined this issue. However if, as we argue in this paper, a radical shift in the articulation of the role and purpose of education and training has taken place it follows that so too has the definition of what it is to be a teacher or academic. The research shows that these patterns of resistances are reshaping the frontiers of learning in different sectors of education and training, and in diverse work and learning sites (for example, Reid & Thomson, 2003; Seddon, 2000, 2002; Smyth, 2001).What passes as defence of the old order is, in practice, a re-making of learning, the learning spaces in which it occurs, and the collective educational ends that are realised and endorsed.

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Beverley Axford

University of Canberra

Terry Seddon

Monash University 

Beverley Axford is a Research Fellow in the School of Education & Community Studies at the Division of Communication and Education at the University of Canberra, ACT 2601.

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Terri Seddon is Professor of Education at Monash University and Director of the Centre for Work and Learning Studies, Clayton, Victoria 3800.

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