Who wants to learn forever? Hyperbole and difficulty with lifelong learning

This paper addresses the issue of how lifelong learning, globalisation and capitalism are related within late modernity. It is critical of the argument that there is now an increasingly homogenous global economy that is knowledge based and that unambiguously requires a high level of cognitive skills in its workers. The idea that globalisation produces such rapid changes in the world of work that learning must be ongoing to cope with it is challenged. It is argued that the key issue for policy-makers concerned to encourage lifelong learning is funding the provision of those learning opportunities that would otherwise not be available. People can learn many worthwhile things at work, at home and elsewhere in informal associations. It makes little sense to duplicate the opportunity to learn those things formally or even in many cases, formally to distinguish such learning from living and working.