Session Information
23 SES 04 C, Adult Education
Paper Session
Contribution
The Nordic countries are probably one of the first regions in the world where independent national states voluntary started to coordinate the development of their education policies (A. O. Telhaug et al., 2004). The institutions for schooling had for centuries been regarded as a most national area like the police and the army but in the nineteen sixties the Social Democratic governments in the Nordic countries began to work for horizontal integration of their education policies and in the nineteen seventies when education and training of adults moved up on the international political agenda were the Nordic countries most active in UNESCO where much education policy making was developed.
Jarl Bengtsson, the former head of CERI in the OECD delivered a lecture at an ASEM meeting in Beijing (2008) where he discussed the development of national strategies for the implementation of lifelong learning. He stressed in retrospect that the main reason why France in the nineteen seventies was unsuccessful with “permanent education” while Sweden was successful with “recurrent education” was that the former country acted on the base of a national implementation strategy. Florian Waldow from Humboldt University (2009) found after studies of education policy making in Sweden a national tendency to “silent borrowing” from international organizations while Hans G. Schuetze from University of British Columbia (2006) observed the opposite tendency: Certain national states tends to influence the education policy making in international organizations. This discrepancy in findings is another argument for an empirical study.
32% of the adults in the Swedish labor force participated in lifelong learning in 2007 according to OECD (2009) and this share is probably the highest in the world. The average share of labor force participation in lifelong learning in the EU as such was in comparison 9 % in the same year. All Nordic countries are having high shares of participation and this is usually explained as a result of a long term tradition and much public funding. However, specific Nordic models for effective implementation may be part of the explanation. This leads to the research question:
How are the Nordic countries implementing their current strategies for adult learning? What kind of education policy making has been going on between the Nordic countries and organizations like Council of Europe, UNESCO, OECD and EU? What seems to be the best model for national implementation of adult learning strategies?
The first objective is the mapping of national models for implementation of strategies for adult learning and the second an investigation of the relations between the Nordic countries and international organizations.
The theoretical framework for the study will be: Knill (2006), Moutsios (2009), Schuetze (2006), and Waldow (2009)
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bengtsson, J. (2008), National Strategies for Implementing Life Long Learning (LLL): an International Perspective. In: Observatory PASCAL. Ehlers, S. (2010), Livslang læring som politisk strategi I 1900-tallets Danmark. Samspillet mellem civilsamfund, stat og marked. In: Uddannelseshistorie 2010. Knill, C. (2006), Implementation. In: European Union: power and policy-making. Routledge. Marcussen. M. (2002), OECD og idespillet. Game over? Hans Reitzel. Moutsios, S. (2009), International organizations and Transnational Education Policy. In Compare. Vol 39, No. 4. OECD (2009), Labour Force Survey. In: Undervisningsministeriets pressemeddelelse den 23. juni 2009. Schuetze, H. G. (2006), International concepts and agendas of lifelong learning. In: Compare. Vol. 36, No. 3. Telhaug, A. O. et al. (2004), From Collectivism to Individualism. Education as Nation Building in a Scandinavian Perspective. In: Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research. Vol. 44, No, 2. Waldow, F. (2009), Undeclared imports: silent borrowing in educational policy making and research in Sweden. In: Comparative Education. Vol. 45, No. 4.
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