The promise of refugee lifelong education: A critical review of the field

The increasing number of refugees, coupled with the protracted nature of refugee situations around the globe, underline the critical importance of refugee education. Since 2010, education has been one of the global strategic priorities of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), but much of the focus and resourcing has been on primary education and, to a lesser extent, secondary education. Recognition of the role of lifelong learning for refugees has been much slower, only recently entering into prominence in global documents and policies. For refugees, the hope and desire for education that will enable them to achieve sustainable and dignified livelihoods has always been a core part of their realities. Lifelong learning has the potential to provide the bridge between disrupted schooling and future aspirations of self-reliance and participation in society. This article situates the emerging agenda for refugee lifelong learning in a postcolonial and global context. The author begins with a critical examination of the postcolonial “logics” which continue to construct and frame the study of refugees, before problematising how lifelong learning is incorporated and conceptualised in global policy. She draws the conclusion that despite global commitments, the realisation of lifelong learning for refugee youth and adults is likely remain frustrated for some time by normative assumptions firmly embedded in the conceptualisation of lifelong learning and the education frameworks of nation states. However, she argues that the recent global disruption to education and the inequalities that have been exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic provide an opportunity to rethink how education is conceptualised and the importance of providing lifelong learning opportunities to enable young people and adults to fulfil their aspirations.

Reclaiming a future that has not yet been: The Faure report, UNESCO’s humanism and the need for the emancipation of education

Fifty years after UNESCO’s publication of Learning to be: The world of education today and tomorrow, the author of this article provides an assessment of this seminal report, commonly known as “the Faure report”. He characterises the educational vision of the report as humanistic and democratic and highlights its emphasis on the need for educational provision throughout the life-course. He demonstrates how the right to education has, over time, been transformed into a duty to learn, Moreover, this duty has been strongly tied to economic purposes, particularly the individual’s duty to remain employable in a fast-changing labour market. Rather than suggesting that Edgar Faure and his International Commission on the Development of Education set a particular agenda for education that has, over time, been replaced by an altogether different agenda, the author suggests a reading of the report which understands it as making a case for a particular relationship between education and society, namely one in which the integrity of education itself is acknowledged and education is not reduced to a mere instrument for delivering particular agendas. Looking back at the report five decades later, he argues that it provides a strong argument for the emancipation of education itself, and that this argument is still needed in the world of today.