Adult education is concerned not with preparing people for life, but rather with helping people to live more successfully. It is to assist adults to increase competence, or negotiate transitions, in their social roles (worker, parent, retiree etc.), to help them gain greater fulfilment in their personal lives, and to assist them in solving personal and community problems.
Darkenwald and Merriam 1982:
Whilst having a bamble on the old tinternet i came across a fascinating article on lifelong learning. I have always thought that this concept of lifelong learning was not a new thing but to find it it stems back as far as it does fascinated me. Personally i am under the opinion that we as humans learn from sperm to worm (or as the more eloquently refer to as cradle to grave).
Life is a learning curve in my opinion, babies learn from within the womb as Beth Skwarecki (2013) states It may seem implausible that fetuses can listen to speech within the womb, but the sound-processing parts of their brain become active in the last trimester of pregnancy, and sound carries fairly well through the mother's abdomen. "If you put your hand over your mouth and speak, that's very similar to the situation the fetus is in," says cognitive neuroscientist Eino Partanen of the University of Helsinki. "You can hear the rhythm of speech, rhythm of music, and so on.".
If you think about it we learn something everyday, whether that be the route to somewhere we have never been before, or that i love the new pair of shoes in Debenhams, its still learning. Bearing that in mind, the fact that lifelong learning as a theory has been discussed for what looks like forever isn't so surprising. It must have been for the Romans to build their cities, the biblical stories to be passed down or the egyptians to have created the pyramids.
