Designing the Just Learning Society: A Critical Inquiry

Designing the Just Learning Society presents an historically attuned and critical theoretical inquiry into the discourse of the learning society, providing a coherent framework for understanding how adults learn in the key domains of human interaction: state, civil society, and workplace. Grappling with contemporary issues, Welton, of Athabasca University, Canada, explores the way power and money distort learning in civil society, the workplace and in cultural life. He asserts that achieving a just learning society calls for collective action to transform organisational and associational life with the recognition that human beings have the capacity for self-determination and self-expression. Welton contends that the alleged emergence of a 'knowledge society' or a 'learning society' cannot be accepted as either new or good, and that 'learning' is not an essentially good thing. Indeed, that learning is harnessed in the modern world to the money-code and channels human energies and capacities in destructive directions. This passionate text speaks directly to an important area of professional and scholarly debate in adult education worldwide and, by engaging many voices, allows the reader to enter into the dialogue.