Lifelong Learning and Education Quality

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Lifelong learning and education quality are the two topics prevailing in the contemporary international and national education policy documents.

We tried to systematize the extensive and various literatures on the quality in education through two discourses on quality: quality assurance discourse and quality construction discourse (Table 1). Each of these discourses, with all the variations and different accents within them, is mainly shaped by the different understanding of the nature of the human activity systems, one of which is the system of educational practice. Professor Béla Banathy (1991), theoretician of the system and systemic changes, distinguishes the five types of human activity systems: rigidly controlled (e.g. factory production line), deterministic (bureaucratic; strongly centralised national education system), purposeful (corporations, industry, services), heuristic (corporations developing new entrepreneurship, research and development agencies, experimental education programs) and the purpose-seeking, like the education system should be (Banathy, 1991).

[Table 1. Two dicourses of eduacation quality - Somewhere here]

Quality assurance discourse is based on the understanding of the systems as rigid and/or deterministic. Theoretic background is positivist – the quality is seen as something tangible and material, something that can be established and investigated; something objective, independent of our values. Knowledge on quality is obtained by quantitative measurements, evaluation scales, correlation studies, experiments and quasi-experiments; empirical research provide data and bases for the theories and postulates of quality which are introduced in the practice. The dominant perspective at this disc...

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...and lifelong learning: governing the subject, New York: Routledge

Hargreaves, D. (2004). Learning for life – the foundation for lifelong learning. Bristol: The Policy Press.

Morrow, R.A., Torres, C.A. (2002). Reading Freire and Habermas: critical pedagogy and transformative social chang. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.

Moss, P., Urban, M. (2010). Democracy and Experimentation: two fundamental values for education. Bertelsmann Stiftung

Pavlović Breneselović, D. (2012). Od prirodnih neprijatelja do partnera – sistemski pristup odnosu porodice i javnog vaspitanja, Beograd: Filozofski fakultet.

Taubman, P. M., (2009). Teaching by numbers : deconstructing the discourse of standards and accountability in education. New York: Routledge.

Woodhead, M. (2006). Changing perspectives on early childhood: theory, research and policy. Paris: UNESCO.

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