Emerging Trends in Higher Education

Chapter 9

* Professor, College of Education, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

1 As B. Lambeir (2005: 350) argues, ‘lifelong learning is the magic spell in the discourse of educational and economic policymakers, as well as in that of the practitioners of both domains.

2 In relation to this, some scholars contend that the discourses on lifelong learning represent ‘a form of biopower’ (Marshall 1995) or self-regulation aiming at reducing the ‘time lag’ between individual skills and economic and technological innovation (Tuschling and Engemann 2006, as cited in Olssen 2006).

3 A similar argument is found in W. Brown’s (2003) work, where he posits that neoliberalism involves a normative rather than an ontological claim about the pervasiveness ...