A critique of Peter Jarvis’s conceptualisation of the lifelong learner in the contemporary cultural context
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Accepted Manuscript (AM)
Author(s)
Bagnall, Richard G
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2017
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This paper examines Peter Jarvis’s conceptualisation of lifelong learners, who are seen as being the individual products of their learning engagements, constrained by their individual biological potentials. They are presented as seeking existentially authentic resolution to dialectically oppositional disjunctures between their individual biographies and their lived experience, in and of the prevailing socio-cultural context. That context, though, is seen as requiring inauthentic learning and thus as being a significantly oppositional presence, calling on the individual to resolve, through learning, the disjunctures that it ...
View more >This paper examines Peter Jarvis’s conceptualisation of lifelong learners, who are seen as being the individual products of their learning engagements, constrained by their individual biological potentials. They are presented as seeking existentially authentic resolution to dialectically oppositional disjunctures between their individual biographies and their lived experience, in and of the prevailing socio-cultural context. That context, though, is seen as requiring inauthentic learning and thus as being a significantly oppositional presence, calling on the individual to resolve, through learning, the disjunctures that it presents. Although the articulated view that all learning is of this form is less than persuasive, the strongly existentialist and humanistic view of the learner is stimulating and appealing. It says important things about learning and its relationship to the human condition, standing as an oppositional irritant to the prevailing hegemony of instrumentally behaviouristic theories of (lifelong) learning: holding them to account by its own standards.
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View more >This paper examines Peter Jarvis’s conceptualisation of lifelong learners, who are seen as being the individual products of their learning engagements, constrained by their individual biological potentials. They are presented as seeking existentially authentic resolution to dialectically oppositional disjunctures between their individual biographies and their lived experience, in and of the prevailing socio-cultural context. That context, though, is seen as requiring inauthentic learning and thus as being a significantly oppositional presence, calling on the individual to resolve, through learning, the disjunctures that it presents. Although the articulated view that all learning is of this form is less than persuasive, the strongly existentialist and humanistic view of the learner is stimulating and appealing. It says important things about learning and its relationship to the human condition, standing as an oppositional irritant to the prevailing hegemony of instrumentally behaviouristic theories of (lifelong) learning: holding them to account by its own standards.
View less >
Journal Title
International Journal of Lifelong Education
Copyright Statement
© 2016 Taylor & Francis (Routledge). This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published online by Taylor & Francis in International Journal of Lifelong Education on 29 December 2016, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/02601370.2017.1268838
Note
This publication has been entered into Griffith Research Online as an Advanced Online Version.
Subject
Education systems
Education systems not elsewhere classified