Overview

Lifelong learning and the democratic imagination is a collection of essays from Adult and Community Educators in Australia, New Zealand, England, Scotland, Canada, America and South Africa. There is a general belief here that democracy is about people consciously sharing power and that such deliberate choices to share power, draw on ideals and values of sharing with and including others.

In modern life this generous and equitable stance has to be learned and re-learned against competing cultures of individualism and competition. Such learning needs more than logical argument. It occurs when powerful evocations of human equality and dignity capture the human imagination and move the heart. The work of this book is to pursue what needs to be done to generate suitable pre-dispositions for this unselfish sociable spirit to take root and grow.

The book has five sections. The first concerns visions of democratic imagining: the second looks at predispositions for democratic imagining. The last three explore the educational work of imagining democracy in three learning arenas: community and work locations, higher and work-related education and schools.

Table of Contents

Reviews

Life Long learning and the democratic imagination seeks to reclaim for lifelong learning its original radical transformative impulse, which appears to have been submerged under instrumental economic aims.

Alison Mackinnon
Hawke Research Institute