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Int Rev Educ (2016) 62:665670
DOI 10.1007/s11159-016-9607-0
INTRODUCTION
Stephen Roche1
Published online: 15 November 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht and UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning 2016
In 2013, the Editorial Board of this journal took the decision to bring its thematic scope and focus into closer alignment with the priorities of UNESCO. Thus, the International Review of Education gained a subtitle, Journal of Lifelong Learning. This was both a bold and a natural step; bold because there are risks attendant to changing an established brand, and natural because IRE has been at home within UNESCO since 1955.1 This decision was born of a desire that IRE should reect a paradigm shift that has been taking place in education research and policy, one which has been explicitly promoted by our parent organisation. In the second IRE issue of 2013, in which the shift of focus was rst announced (Roche 2013), I quoted the 1972 Faure Report, commissioned by UNESCO, which described lifelong education as the master concept for educational policies in the years to come (Faure et al. 1972, p. 182). The report envisaged the return of education to its true nature, which is to be total and lifelong, and transcends the limits of institutions, programmes and methods imposed on it down the centuries (ibid.,p. 143). It would be the principle on which the over-all organisation of a[n education] system is founded (ibid., p. 143).
Lifelong learning might be compared to a wide-angle lens; it takes in aspects of learning that have always existed such as adult, non-formal and informal learning and offers conceptual space to the many new modes of learning which are emerging in the Information Age. It shifts the emphasis from questions of what and how (curriculum, method and mode of delivery) that have traditionally dominated
1 Founded in 1931 as the International Education Review, this journal was initially edited by Friedrich Schneider of the University of Cologne in cooperation with six institutes; three in Germany, two in the United States and one in Switzerland. For more on the history of the journal, see Dave (1984) and McIntosh (2002).
& Stephen [email protected]
1 UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, Hamburg, Germany
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