What can lifelong education researchers learn from the COVID-19 pandemic? There are, of course, ‘quick’ lessons: societies, for instance, clearly learn from experience. East Asian societies, and governments, learned from SARS and the devastating effect it had in cities such as Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Beijing in 2003 (Abraham, 2004). Of course there was the general lesson that a new coronavirus should not be taken lightly: no doubt there was also a lot of deeper and more detailed knowledge developed within institutions – hospitals, emergency services, schools and the like – about how to handle such situations. In this editorial, however, we want to reflect a little more widely on what light the pandemic shines on longstanding problems in lifelong education.