Human lifecycle development and the experiential learning foundations of an integrated lifelong education framework

Introduction: A 21st-century context for the challenge of better integrating lifelong learning in ‘modern education’?

The growing importance of the general concept and related national policies of lifelong learning (and/or lifelong education) also reflect dramatic changes to education both globally and locally in the 21st-century (e.g. Jarvis & Watts, 2009). This is exemplified by recent moves by Japan and Korea (following on similar but less developed projections about lifelong learning by the European Union) to include school and higher education in a larger lifelong education framework (Yang & Yorozu, 2015). Global confusions about the distinction between lifelong education and learning perhaps illustrate some larger dilemmas and issues. This paper will consider the changing nature of 21st-century education in relation to two linked aims here which often get mixed up. One is to consider the renewed importance of informal lifelong learning based on direct as well as indirect human experience – a basic tenet of the experiential learning philosophy of John Dewey and many others but especially including here the well-known Kolb models. The second (a basis for the other) is to outline a related larger policy as well as practical context for making a clearer and more consistent distinction between lifelong education and lifelong learning.

Since emerging as more significantly a policy rather than practical concept in recent decades in light of the challenge of ageing societies and linked aspirations of knowledge economy or society (Volles, 2016), lifelong learning has become a relatively common-place term in many countries around the world with both top-down and bottom-up imperatives of use (Jarvis & Watts, 2009). The policy adaptation of the term for a view of learning throughout life or as a lifelong process was initially conceived in European Union education policies through the EU’s Bologna Declaration of 1999. Just a year later it had become a key focus of the 2000 Lisbon strategy – an action and development economic plan for the EU to become an advanced knowledge economy which in 2007 framed the assumptions and goals of the EU’s lifelong learning program (Clain, 2016). Conversely, there has been a bottom-up adaptation of the term as around the world the unemployed, new graduates, and those trying to retain existing work or careers have realised that continuing education, professional development and workplace learning are now basic requirements of future employability (Fejes, 2014). This is in the context of how the notion of stable trajectories of employment and career as well as clear-cut retirement options have begun to rapidly change or even disappear alongside the dramatically changing nature of work, technology and society – that is, in terms of the related imperatives of globalisation, new technologies taking over many jobs, rising rates of long-term employment, and so on (e.g. Field, Burke, & Cooper, 2013).

Much of the rhetoric of lifelong learning has remained focused also on the self-directed and even adventurous pursuit of knowledge for personal and self-motivated (as well as professional and work related) reasons (e.g. Taylor, 2009). However, it is noteworthy that related policy developments all took place in terms of how the 1995 General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) also proposed a review of education in terms of marketisation and privatisation principles (Verger & Robertson, 2012). In this way also, as we have explored in various ways for some time now (e.g. Richards, 2013, 2015, 2018), a new emerging plethora of variations and alternatives to the stable ‘one size fits all’ tendency of modern education have also been in the process of effectively collapsing or at least transforming that model. In recent decades, formal notions of education also as a public good have been disappearing as forces of commercialisation and commodification transform schools, colleges and universities, as workplace training and continuing professional development options are corporatised, as public as well as private universities internationalise as part of national policy (also serving as de facto immigration policies for some governments whilst others lament a brain drain), as flexible models of schooling as well as higher education emerge, as the social media options of the internet also include mass online learning options (such as MOOCs), as non-formal options for continuing education proliferate in terms of personal interest as well as professional development options, and as both third and fourth age (e.g. University of Third Age) lifelong learning options for retirees, seniors and also others who no longer work become more commonplace.

The need for a more comprehensive but also convergent understanding of the concept lifelong learning has also had cross-cultural variations. In OECD countries where the forces of modernisation have been most advanced, the concept has tended to be seen as an extension or add-on of some kind and in several different ways to the late 20th-century ‘massification’ of formal education (e.g. Akulu, 2017) with the promise that this would ensure employability and a secure or stable life. This is arguably why the concept has been often seen as interchangeable with the related notion and initially preferred term lifelong education (Billett, 2010). On one hand, many therefore naturally understand the term in both academic and also vocational training contexts as somehow a need to up-skill and renew credentials as well as skills and knowledge to ensure employability. On the other hand, in the education field itself many Western teachers have adapted the term in schools and universities in terms of various ‘active learning’ models (self-directed/learner-centred/constructivist models of learning, etc.) which address transmission learning, rote learning, and the related exam-based curriculum model of the passive, imitative and ‘non-thinking’ learner (e.g. Crick, Stringher, & Ren, 2014). Likewise, as epitomised by Knowles’ (1980) andragogical model, there are in the emerging fields of continuing and adult education (as well as seniors’ lifelong learning related perspectives) which resist the credentialist, employability and related economic rationales for concepts as well as policies of lifelong education in modern society. In such ways, many educators as distinct from policy-makers have still retained a view of lifelong learning as a personal equivalent to past ideals of education as a public good – for instance, John Dewey’s notion that education grounded in direct and also lifelong experience is the key to any modern society maturing to achieve the promise of functioning democracy.

In contrast, as Rogers (2005) has suggested, in many developing countries such as Thailand, there is a strong non-formal education tradition in part for cultural reasons and in part because of a past need to supplement formal education opportunities in many rural and ‘less developed’ areas. In other words, in many more traditional or ‘less modernised’ non-Western societies the concept of lifelong learning is often viewed somewhat differently than in either Western or more highly developed (e.g. OECD countries). As we have discussed elsewhere (Ratana-Ubol & Richards, 2016), this is a perspective more inclined to take an integrated or spectrum view of the distinct formal, non-formal and also informal or experiential modes of learning. In such a view the concept of lifelong learning is actually nothing new in a generic sense of the term – rather understood as the process by which most people just struggle to survive as they adjust to change, try to develop themselves, aspire to give their children better opportunities in life, and still hold to the cultural framing of the lifecycle stages of human development and learning. This is despite how in our experience many young school and college or university learners in every country often fear or resist this and the related term lifelong education as somehow the unpleasant thought typically verbalised as follows (or in similar ways across different cultural contexts): ‘does this mean we have to do exams for the rest of our life?’.

Around the world, the simultaneous rising costs of education and rising rates of also graduate unemployment epitomise and also amplify local as well as global contexts of social divisions or conflict, economic failure, and even political instability. Both developing and developed countries have their own versions of an ultimately related and convergent process of people losing confidence in their educational systems – and viewing these in some state of ‘malaise’ involving additional disconnects between knowledge and experience or application. In many developing countries a lack of vision and accountability is often linked to an issue of entrenched rote learning practices (e.g. Watkins, 2012). Conversely, in developed Western countries especially (but not only), there is the widespread and growing paradox of ‘credential creep’ and its related variation ‘academic inflation’ in schools as well as higher education (e.g. Marshallsea, 2016). This typically involves a process of basic and changing credentials (especially academic diplomas and degrees) increasingly required for different jobs as forms of occupational licensing and professional certification (Lederman, 2014). Linked to a related imperatives of mass education policies, this often paradoxically results in overqualification and devalued standards as well as growing numbers of unemployed graduates. It also typically manifests as employer criticism that graduates lack real-world ‘employability’.

Yet, there is an associated problem also often ignored and underestimated – that young people in general (as well as graduates especially) are regularly losing confidence in themselves as well as their future systems as well as the education systems they see little alternative to. This also tends to include the very informal lifelong learning process that could perhaps provide the active learning and ‘critical thinking’ modes of initiative, resilience and valuing of life experience arguably needed to provide an antidote to the perceived loss of quality in the formal higher education system – for instance, in such terms as the growing casualisation of teaching, online provision of courses (as mere content transmission), and associated reliance on a mere ‘exam-based curriculum’ as the basis for credentialisation. Yet the same imperatives inform the changing nature of work and related career options – exemplified by such notions as the casualisation of work, the rise of the ‘gig economy’, loss of jobs to technology, etc. In this way, diverse education systems and societies in the global context are often similarly affected by the key 21st-century characteristics of what Bauman (2007) has called ‘liquid times’ and ‘liquid modernity’. These concepts refer to an emerging global condition of dramatic uncertainty and unprecedented change also reflected in increasingly fragmented and confused individual identities everywhere that are playing havoc with the once familiar and more reliable options of earlier ‘solid modernity’ as well as traditional society.

Acknowledging how this is also really part of a ‘wider modern cultural malaise’, Ecclestone and Hayes (2009) have usefully described how the global education system (including various notions of lifelong as well formal education) thus increasingly represents an underlying model of self ‘diminished’ by the breakdown in human confidence in the links between experience and knowledge as well as learning: ‘A diminished human subject finds exposure to uncertainty and adversity, including disappointment, despair and conflict simultaneously threatening to “the integrity of the self” and inhibiting of it’ (p. xi). Such an extra-curricular and potentially lifelong new adaptation of the ‘passive learner’ syndrome in modern formal education requires an antidote. Thus, Ecclestone and Hayes point out how human resilience-building (not ‘victim’ reinforcement) is or should be the main focus of better future lifelong education and learning models (cf. also Bernard, 2004).

In short, a relevant framework is needed to restore confidence in the essential learning process of converting lifelong (macro) as well as direct (micro) experience into sustainable knowledge and resilient living. This is to the extent that learning might be defined as the direct or indirect (including both informal reflection and formally taught content) translation and possible transformation of experience into knowledge, understanding, and regular practice – thus linking the quality of life at the macro level to the quality of experience as a typical response at a micro level.

Harnessing experience as informal lifelong education and learning

As indicated, the ageing society phenomenon has played a role in governments everywhere increasingly encouraged to promote and support policies of lifelong education – even if in some cases just variations of the ‘active ageing’ concept to promote healthier seniors less reliant on medical treatment and welfare. A by-product of such imperatives is perhaps greater awareness that the modern education system also might include informal and non-formal as well as formal modes of education and learning. This is also viewed in relation to the modern formal education system to include both informal learning modes and non-formal options of education. However, from the point of view of every particular or individual ‘lifecycle’ grounded in the informal learning of experience, learning is a lifelong process involving informal, formal and non-formal modes of learning generally corresponding to unstructured, semi-structured, and structured activities and processes. In other words, human experience goes beyond the behavioural reinforcement of a merely ‘animal’ stimulus response to experience to involve constructive or dialogical cognitive and social processes of learning transformation. This frames learner development not just in infancy and youth but all through adulthood and later life (e.g. Hillman, 1999).

In this way (and condensing or confusing some of the steps), Kolb along with his initial collaborator Ron Fry (Kolb & Fry, 1975) developed their basic model of experiential learning to depict the optimal process of how active learners are able to transform direct or primary experience (and also the secondary-level ‘experiencing’ of perceptual awareness and also reflection in and on experience) into forms of human knowledge. From the perspective of related ‘active learning’ or ‘learner-centred’ models (e.g. both cognitive and social models of constructivist learning), formal notions of education tend to reinforce what are generally recognised as surface modes of learning compared with the deeper learning processes (including ‘transferable application’) of progressive experiential, action, reflective practice, and integrated (or transformative) modes of an informal learning cycle grounded in (or embodied by) experience (e.g. Marton & Säljö, 1997).

As Argyris and Schön (1978) recognised, the ‘single loop learning’ of groups or organisations corresponds to the ‘surface learning’ of individuals. This is in contrast to how a rather ‘double loop’ engagement with and change in underlying structures or patterns of meaning also corresponds to the transformative ‘deep learning’ model of Marton and Säljö (1997) – that is, the capacity of individuals to more effectively achieve understanding, transferable knowledge and adaptive reflective practice. The various and convergent modes of tacit knowledge available to every lifelong learner also interact with different forms of explicit knowledge throughout the various stages of life. As the knowledge management models influenced by Polanyi suggest (e.g. Nonaka & von Krogh, 2009), the harnessing of human ‘experience’ is the key to how explicit knowledge of information, skills and other related aspects of ‘content’ might be transformed into tacit knowledge and applied understanding. Conversely however, the tacit knowledge as well as deep learning foundations of lifelong learning remains the ultimate framework for and context of formal as well as informal and non-formal education.

The tacit–explicit knowledge connection explains why the key to ‘active learning’ and related models (such as cognitive or social constructivism and the learner-centred paradigm) either directly or indirectly remains human experience. The basic transmission or ‘spoon-feeding’ (exam-based curriculum, etc.) model which has dominated modern education tends to project a view of teachers and trainers transmitting information or skills to predominantly passive and unquestioning students also often acquiring attitudes of indifference and a demoralising lack of interest or intrinsic motivation for lifelong learning (e.g. Gatto, 1992). As indicated from the outset above by references to the work of John Dewey, Kurt Lewin and others as well as David Kolb, related notions of action and activity-based experiential learning models have been cited to encourage deep and not just surface learning. Useful support is also offered by the insights of Malcolm Knowles and others that the ‘andragogic’ rather than conventional pedagogic approach is centrally premised on the idea that as people age they acquire a domain of experience which is a valuable resource for learning – one that typically needs to be harnessed along with the related imperative of intrinsic motivation for effective adult and continuing education to take place. In other words, whilst the encouragement and harnessing of ongoing (and non-formal and formal as well as informal) ‘experiential learning’ is the key to optimal learning at every stage of the human lifecycle, this is critically so also at stages beyond youthful development and formal schooling.

In contrast to the top-down teaching model, the primary process of learner experiential learning is complemented by the ‘lifelong teaching’ role to design and frame semi-structured learning activities and ‘environments’. This is epitomised by the generic or basic three pillars of ‘activity-based’ learning (problem-based learning, inquiry-based learning and project-based learning), the use of cognitive tools and situated learning and cognition as also a process of ‘social learning’ (e.g. Kimble & Hildreth, 2008). As well as such curriculum design strategies and related approaches to optimally framing effective ‘learning environments’, teaching to encourage more effective and/or deep-level learning links to the present’ here and now’ experience of learning include notions of the teachable moment, critical incidents, and ‘just-in-time’ learning (Simkins & Maier, 2010).

Those who thus assert that informal education is a contradiction in terms tend to reinforce the modern view of lifelong learning (or lifelong education as UNESCO called it before the EU switched to lifelong learning as the preferred term) (e.g. Clain, 2016). This in contrast to how formal and even non-formal concepts of education are typically viewed as socially, externally, and institutionally organised). From a lifecycle perspective, however, we can make a distinction between an ad hoc and purposeful learning from experience which is ultimately referenced from within rather than externally by the human capacity for self-organisation, for reflective practice, and for taking responsibility for personal behaviour and development. Or as Alan Rogers (2005) puts it so well in his landmark study Non-Formal Education:

Informal learning… [is] all that incidental learning, unstructured, unpurposeful but the most extensive and most important part of all the learning that all of us do everyday of our lives… Somewhere along the learning continuum, we come to purposeful and assisted learning (education in its widest sense). When we control this and individualize it, learn what we want for as long as we want and stop when we want, we are engaging in informal education.

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Figure 1.

The experiential foundations of all learning.

The challenge to solve problems represents the common focus of the basic problem-based learning cycle (identify a central or basic problem, develop a strategic action plan, and implement a solution) which cuts across the informal vs. more structured and reflective interventions in or uses of such models as Kolb’s ‘experiential learning cycle’ (concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation, and active experimentation) (Richards, 2015). It is in terms of the common focus on addressing and trying to solve problems that both action learning/research/knowledge-building models (as the basis of ‘stories’ of learning or problem-solving) and explicit story structures (typically as forms of virtual action learning cycles exemplified by the concept of ‘thought experiments’) might begin to be recognised as alternately micro and macros cycles of informal lifelong learning. That is, as we propose further below, the lifecycle exemplifies the four key stages of a ‘generic experiential learning cycle’ making sense of the initial chaos or discreteness of perceptions and communications: the foundation of direct and immediate experience, emergent comprehension (involving reflective awareness both in and on experience), recognition refined by or as continuing reflection, and an integrated surface translation or possible deep-level transformation of experience and thus ‘part-whole relations’ into a related process of knowledge building. A related assumption articulated by Marton and Säljö in their (1997) model of six surface-to-deep conceptions of learning is that the basic mode of deep learning (the ‘active search for meaning’ rather than passive observation and mere reproduction of the ‘parts’ of any whole) is not only transformed as modes of ‘understanding the world’ but at the deepest and highest level as a process of ‘developing as a person’. The pivotal attribute of deep learning described by Marton and Säljö is most significantly the function of ‘relating ideas to previous knowledge and experience’ through related processes of reflective thought and interactive communication.

In its wider usage (especially by educators), Kolb’s cycle is typically viewed as having different starting points and trajectories (mainly from either concrete experience to abstract conceptualisation and from active experimentation to reflective observation) – reflecting the move from practice to theory and vice versa. Kolb (1984) was aware of the dilemma of this apparent contradiction and it seems that his response to it was to increasingly focus on the four stages in terms of their correspondence to distinct ‘learning styles’ (i.e. his related Learning Style Inventory model). He additionally proposed that different individuals tend to have a single learning style preference from adolescence through to mid-career and later life with an integrated perspective being more applicable before and after this life trajectory. Kolb realised that in early and later stages of life different experiential learning styles as well as stages involve an integrated and not just specialised function of identification based on work or social roles. In this way Kolb did come to recognise two distinct lines of axis (continuums) which he held to be both open to conflicting choices. The north–south axis he called the perception continuum – involving the function of ‘transforming experience’ via either ‘feeling’ or ‘thinking’. Conversely, the so-called east–west axis he called the processing continuum – involving the function of ‘approaching a task’ in terms of grasping experience via either ‘doing’ or ‘watching’. This would also seem to correspond to the related ‘opposite errors’ of experiential learning identified by Donald Schön’s (1983) reflective practitioner model – doing without thinking and thinking without doing.

As depicted in Figure 2, such a revised model helps clarify that typical applications of Kolb’s initial learning cycle model tend to confuse a second and subsequent cycle of intentional intervention or future planning based on memories or records and evidence from the past. One way of putting this is that ‘reflective observation’ grounded in ‘concrete experience’ represents a receptive cycle which links to a distinct activity-based or interventionist cycle of practice (‘active experimentation’) which can either generate or be the focus of ‘top-down’ abstraction or theorisation (‘abstract conceptualisation’). In other words, persistent notions that it does not matter where one starts or ends with the Kolb learning cycle are basically wrong and a confused interpretation of the model – as Kolb himself increasingly appreciated and would seem to be a factor in his later focusing on learning ‘types’ not stages.

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Figure 2.

Beyond Kolb’s dilemma: Towards an integrated model of experiential learning.

As Peter Jarvis (1987) for instance has touched upon, the glaring absence in Kolb’s overall model (and especially in relation to the function of ‘abstract conceptualisation’) is ‘prior knowledge’ embracing both the individual and collective domains to constitute the dialogical language-ideas interplay of both domains as a dynamic and open-ended ‘ecosystem’. In other words, just as there are the two generic modes of simple and closed feedback loops (input-output and action-effect), also in natural self-organising systems as well as in human processes of interactions which are likewise open to be transformed as thought, language-use, and communication. In similar fashion to the double cycles of perception and conception, listening and speaking, reading and writing and even learning and teaching, this involves a direct process of comprehending experience as a transformative cycle in both space (constructing schemas) and time (how such initial schemas inform further or ongoing experience). In this way direct human experience not only links with but interacts with both (a) the secondary or indirect cognitive-social domain as well applied or performative process of knowledge-building, and (b) a linked but interactive cycle of ‘action’ and thus also ‘reflective practice’ as spontaneous events, planned interventions or specific constructions of meaning (including speech or thought as well as physical and social ‘acts’). This takes place either as an alternation between initial trial and error experimentation and subsequent repetition/reinforcement or as an intentional ‘opening up’ vs. ‘closing down’ of all human systems of representation as either positive or negative self-fulfilling prophecies (expectations).

Just as the Kolb model might be interpreted to really link two cycles (the related passive-active processes and feedback loops of comprehension/reception and intentional activity) so too the human lifecycle might be better understood to similarly involve two overlapping cycles or ‘arcs’ grounded in the physical reality of the developing but also ageing human body. Whereas in the first part of life most individuals tend to mainly focus on the externally referenced concerns and achievements of ‘social identity’ linked to objective outcomes and materialistic values, many later life learning models (e.g. Tornstam’s notion of gerotranscendence) recognise a typical transition to ‘the inner story’ of self – involving emergent self-knowledge or personal/psychological development building rather on emotional, interpretive and ‘critical incident’ challenges of meaningful ‘active ageing’. In other words, direct human experience involves both receptive and active modes of learning possibility at every stage of the human lifecycle. In this way, the informal experiential learning process available to every person in the varying degrees of every cultural context represents a convergent foundation also of all modes of education including the non-formal and formal. As we explore further in the next section, the integrated lifelong education framework for optimal learning throughout the key stages of human lifecycle development was thus conceived in relation to the naturally systemic structure represented by the four most critical crises as well as pivotal stages of the completed human lifecycle.

Lifecycle learning and a more relevant framework for 21C lifelong education?

We have discussed above how the four stages of a basic cycle of human experience described by Kolb (also understood as the capacity for experiential learning) might be interpreted as the convergent interplay of two feedback cycles (that is, input-output and action-effect loops corresponding to surface and deep learning modes). Our revised formulation of this (the foundation of direct or immediate experience, emergent awareness, continuing action learning or reflective practice, and the integrated transformation of experience into knowledge) also provides a useful framework for representing the macro cycle of human or life experience – the life-cycle of every individual with its lifelong implications of the human capacity for informal experiential learning. At the macro level (i.e. the ‘quality of life’ domain), the four stages of a basic ‘quality of experience’ micro cycle thus might be also linked to the four pivotal lifecycle ‘crises’ (see Figure 3) which have formal and non-formal as well informal of the social structure of human identity transitions as well as the psychological personal growth. Such a model represents an adaptation of Erik Erikson’s (1998) later ‘lifecycle completion’ re-conception of his own famous eight stages and related transitional ‘life crises’ model – or ‘life transitions’ as Levinson (1978) preferred to put it. Erikson’s developmental model outlines generally universal perspectives of a ‘normal’ person able to internally as well as externally (i.e. psychologically, emotionally and/or cognitively as well as physically and socially) navigate the key challenges, obstacles, and related stages of life experience with basic success. In other words, everyone grapples with the challenge of retaining a basic integrity (or what Hillman calls a unique ‘character’ pattern) throughout life also in terms of an interplay of both private and public domains of identification and interaction.

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Figure 3.

The four pivotal crises (and the outward vs. inward arcs) of the human lifecycle. Adapted from Richards (2017).

Erikson’s revised ‘lifecycle completion’ model of human development was posthumously interpreted by his wife in the appendix to this publication to indicate an additional ninth stage corresponding to Tornstam’s (2005) end-of-life stage of gerotranscendence. This is a stage held to involve renewed elements of acceptance, satisfaction and even celebration of life and the ‘wisdom of (integrated) experience’ in terms of a culminating life review in the face of impending death as part of any natural cycle process. Initially formulated as a psychosocial adaptation of Freud’s psychosexual focus on the young infant, the initial life stage of childhood before adolescence is actually covered by four of Erikson’s model of life stages of human development. In short, our adaptation here in terms of the four most pivotal crises of the human lifecycle recognises that the critical phase of infancy is clearly (as Erikson himself recognised) the initial trust crisis or dilemma when a child is born into the world and needs to be supported to achieve an initial independence to interact with both physical and social environments – that is, to develop resilience and avoid the condition of a crippling demoralisation of the learning-experience connection. As many of his additional studies focused on, Erikson’s framework further identifies the critical stage of ‘stable ego’ or identity formation and ongoing reinforcement in the identity crisis transition from childhood or adolescence more specifically to adulthood.

Conversely, the model suggests that if any stage is not successfully resolved by any individual (as an interplay of what Erikson called dystonic vs. syntonic tendencies) then a person will retain unresolved issues that will return to disrupt, obstruct and/or demoralise later stages of development. This especially applies to the first stage of establishing a foundation for development in terms of trust in the world as infants first negotiate external or actual physical and social worlds. This also applies to the other stages which cover the often difficult childhood transition to adulthood and mature individual identity, taking on work and/or responsibility for a family, and later stages. In many traditional cultures this typically entailed becoming a respected elder of the community with responsibility for the collective knowledge as well as the ongoing ‘education’ of the young as a process of supported ‘initiation’. In such ways and to the extent that any individual human development is also socially structured in changing formal modes of identification, achievement, and access to life opportunities, the traditional rites of passage may be interpreted to represent at least some of the corresponding socialisation functions of the modern formal education system – in particular, the transmission of past knowledge to the young, reproducing the current social order, and the allocation to individuals of roles in society.

Erikson’s work also recognised how such transitions can be either associated with or even precipitated by external events or identity crises as the triggers for great opportunities for personal development. From an overall lifecycle perspective, the most pivotal transition is the so-called ‘mid-life crisis’ which Erikson associated with a basic integrity vs. despair conflict – that is, with some innate need for people to revive themselves emotionally and/or mentally in mid-life to avoid ‘stagnating’. This may also be seen as a potential transition from the identity cycle and another of later life maturity (involving potentially emergent self-knowledge through engagement with the inherent knowledge and even ‘wisdom’ of the human lifecycle) instead of futile efforts to regress to past youth. An overall appreciation of how Erikson’s lifecycle development model involves four pivotal ‘crises’ thus entails further recognition of how the associated ‘four stages of life’ model also applied by Carl Jung (childhood, youth, maturity and old age) is consistent with various traditional models such as the ‘four seasons’ metaphor of life course common in many traditional societies (Kastenbaum, 1993; Plotkin, 2006).

From a cyclic perspective, mention of a transition from an outward arc of the lifecycle from birth to developing a stable identity in adulthood is usefully contrasted with what we are identifying here as an ‘inward arc’ of subsequent identification and learning. Also, the larger foundations of the convergent human lifecycle, the typical emergence of ‘later life learning’ represents a stage of human development no longer focused on youthful ambitions and externals. It is rather concerned more with the coherent ‘inner story’ or basic individual ‘thread’ of the overall lifecycle process and its diverse and changing perspectives as people age with experience.

Such a related framework provides a useful basis for recognising four key complementary tensions at work in the exemplary human lifecycle stages of ageing. These complementary tensions have a general connection to the four distinct stages of lifelong learning to the extent that they productively exemplify four aspects as well as stages of any natural system as a cycle of transformation. The foundation stage depicts how individual as well as social development ever takes place as a dynamic interplay between domains of both tacit and explicit knowledge. The emergent stage of lifelong learning depicts the deep learning propensity of a self-directed, autonomous and independent ‘active learner’ in a related dialogical relation to the corresponding notion of a mentor, coach or even counsellor as the most effective teacher paradigm in lifelong education. That is, rather than just transmitting content to passive learners, lifelong education teachers and mentors are (or should be) supportive facilitators of various reflective as well as practical modes of across the four generic stages of the experiential learning process – the micro recapitulation of the macro level cycle of learning as lifelong human development. The continuing stage makes a complementary distinction between continuing professional (or social role) development and various aspects of personal interest modes of continuing education rather linked to not only a personal interest or growth rationale but also the use of free leisure time for ‘learning to learn again’ (e.g. Crick, Stringher, & Ren, 2014). Finally, the fourth and final culminating stage of the lifecycle focuses on lifelong education as a process of coming to terms with human mortality, impending death, and living as also a quest to learn the some individual or particular lifecycle ‘meaning’.

A revised model of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs might also be interpreted to usefully complement the Erikson framework of development to convergently represent a systemic view of a lifelong learner that undergoes different emphases as well as stages of development in any individual human life. Such a view recognises how the developmental aspects of human adaptation to different environments inevitably links biological, social and cognitive aspects of thought and behaviour within a wider or greater framework of lifelong learning. Maslow’s model can be viewed systemically as an interplay of essentially physical, social and self-development domains from a spatial perspective which tends to mainly focus on extrinsic motivations before the higher level and more developed stage of self-actualisation. Human lifecycle development is usually just viewed as a biological process in relation to physical environment. A more integrated view including social, cognitive and metacognitive as well as other higher-order functions is applicable to the education domain in modern as well as traditional contexts. In contrast to merely academic or even simply vocational modes of education and learning, there have long been many alternative views focusing on the ‘whole child/student’ which rather emphasise ‘all round development’ or ‘well-rounded education’ – involving physical activity or sport, the cultivation of initiative and resilience and the encouragement of creativity and innovation (e.g. the Montessori and Waldorf schools). Models such as Bloom’s taxonomy have encouraged more integrated approaches in formal schooling, and employers regularly call on higher education institutions to produce graduates who have basic ‘generic skills’ of teamwork appreciation, effective communication, and problem-solving capability. Even an integrated approach can be applied to later life learning as to early childhood in terms of addressing the whole person in terms of such short-hands as engaging ‘body, mind and spirit’.

The different views of Vygotsky and Piaget on the development of children to adult maturity are typically seen as conflicting, but within the framework suggested here might be viewed in a more complementary and also convergent way. Piaget’s emphasis on cognitive development as emergent abstract thinking grounded in both biological and psychological processes of maturation as well as human language-use distinguishes between the ongoing assimilation of experience and transformational accommodations at the deep level of underlying cognitive schemas. Vygotsky’s contrasting view of cognitive development as basically a social process of thinking grounded in language-use – and by extension in social values and cultural associations rather than experience per se – is typically described as a process of internalisation. Recent adaptations of Piaget’s model in terms of the integrative functions of ‘postformal’ and ‘reversibility’ modes of thinking (e.g. Berger, 2014) are perhaps complementary to the transformational processes of dialogue in some corresponding adaptations of Vygotsky (1934/1986). In this way as Mayer (2008) has suggested, Dewey’s lifelong education model of experiential learning can provide a framework for the alternate approaches of Piaget and Vygotksy. Or, to put this another way, Piaget’s psychological model and related concrete-abstract continuum of cognitive development and the Vygotskyian conception (as well as corresponding lower vs. higher order learning continuum) of thinking, language-use and communication as fundamentally and convergently a socialisation process together represent interdependent functions and experiential learning ‘loops’. In other words, viewed as complementary rather than as inevitably conflicting models of the basic learning process they represent a kind of horizontal ‘middle’ layer at the intersection between the micro-level experiential learning cycle and the macro knowledge-building domain of the human lifecycle.

A re-framed version of Maslow’s (1973) hierarchy of basic human needs compares with how the Erikson model generally takes a rather temporal perspective on the unfolding or growing and learning as the basic intrinsic motivation of each individual life. Therefore, Figure 4 depicts a convergent outward arc (or externally focused lifelong ‘surface learning’ loop) in the transition between or linking of physical and social levels of need in the Maslow model giving way to but also complementing the ‘inward’ arc (i.e. the internally referenced lifelong ‘deep learning’ loop). This moves from emotional neediness to a level or process of self- actualisation – which Maslow generally defined as the individual process of achieving various potentials lying at the ‘farther end of human nature’. Maslow’s additional reference to the peak experiences (and the related concept of ongoing or sustained plateau experiences) of healthy individuals to describe the process of achieving some meaningful degree of self-actualisation accords with related notions of optimal learning or what Gross (1991) refers to as ‘peak’ lifelong learning. As part of his ‘humanistic education’ recommendation, Maslow outlined a related a notion of intrinsic learning that clearly represents a useful conception of lifelong learning: ‘learning to be a human being, and second, learning to be this human being’ (p. 164).

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Figure 4.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs re-framed: A natural systems view of the lifelong learner. Adapted from Richards (2017).

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Figure 5.

Towards an integrated lifelong education framework to support optimal lifelong learning.

As indicated, a convergent view of the experiential learning cycle may be usefully seen as also a micro ‘informal learning’ cycle ultimately linked to a related macro cycle of human lifelong development – that is, in terms of the link between the related concepts of the ‘quality of experience’ and the ‘quality of life’. Just as Alan Rogers discusses the transition from informal learning to informal education as intentions or designs to harness the regular opportunities and endless possibilities of our ‘constant experience’, so a similar alignment of external events and internal imperatives may be held to reflect the convergent interplay of human individual identity ‘social maintenance’ and the deep learning purposes of the human capacity for self-development, self-knowledge and what Maslow and others like Tornstam refer to as a ‘self-transcendence’ function. The distinction made above to the convergent yet distinct externally vs. internally referenced cycles of experience implicit in but often confused in applications of the (micro) Kolb learning cycle model therefore have a systemic correspondence to our related view of similarly convergent yet distinct individual identity and self-development cycles of the influential lifelong cycle model of human development described by Erikson.

We have adapted the surface vs. deep learning distinction to discuss how these alternately micro and macro cycles of human experience involve both externally and internally referenced feedback loops. In related fashion to Agyris and Schon’s similar distinction between single and double loop learning processes, modes of reflection and meaningful action (i.e. our thinking and doing) are or should also be interdependent collective as well as individual cognitive functions of ‘reflective practice’ to harness experience in any or every situation throughout the various stages of the human lifecycle. In this view the mid-life crisis might be interpreted to represent a transition from the surface learning of externally referenced individual identity to the rather deep and informal learning focus of life as also optimally a process of developing or achieving greater self-knowledge. As exemplified also by Viktor Frankl’s related concept of the ‘existential crisis’ concerning the meaning of ‘a life’ (and the meaning of life more widely) this is also an ever-present lifecycle challenge or opportunity to conduct a ‘life-review’. As Frankl (1984, p. 77) put it in terms of the depths of despair in a WW2 concentration camp: ‘we had to learn ourselves…that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us’.

Dominant and conventional notions of learning have been turned on their head by the emerging model of ‘neuroplasticity’ which recognises that brain development is ongoing to the end, and also that ‘deep learning’ cognitive activity grounded in experience can renew as well as extend brain capacity and thought processes. The important implications of this for lifelong learning (Guglielman, 2012) are helping us to realise that that people are never too old to learn if they retain or regularly practice a proactive expectation, effort, and attitude or intention (i.e. a positive self-fulfilling prophecy). This reinforces the distinction Carol Dweck (2012) has made between the demoralisation of people with fixed mindsets unable to adapt to change or learn from experience and the growth mindset of someone actively recognising and pursuing the option of greater personal autonomy, resilience and performative effectiveness in crises or stages of change.

In the 21st-century these related processes are both challenged and supported by the emerging roles of new digital technologies. This includes both the provision of endless online information access (i.e. the internet as a development which forever subverted the unquestioned authority of teachers to be automatically right about everything) and also the digital facilitation of social networks of interaction, community, and knowledge-sharing (a lifeline also for those isolated and sick or incapacitated). This is a lifecycle basis for creativity and innovation just as relevant for the elderly as it for the young, a basis for ‘learning to learn again’ in the inward arc of life just as it is a foundation of ‘learning to learn’ in the outward arc of youth. And it also refers to how globalisation as a cultural rather than economic imperative is linking up people everywhere from both traditional collectivist and modern individualistic cultures (i.e. overcoming or rather reframing transitional imperatives of social as well as knowledge diversification, fragmentation and complexity) (e.g. Richards, 2013).

The key function of ‘life reviews’ as a method or even process of lifelong learning throughout life as well as towards the end of life (e.g. Haber, 2006) is to achieve a ‘balanced’ self-evaluation (usually by correcting or balancing unfair negative self-images or unbalanced bad memories). This recalls the generic challenge and purpose of reflective evaluation in and on experience and the experiential or action learning cycle to strike a ‘constructive evaluation’ balance. This is a balance between the passivity-inducing approach of overly negative or mistakes-focused criticism (i.e. typical of the general assessment strategy of modern formal education) and also the opposite tendency to ‘uncritical positivity’ or inflated self-esteem which may also set people up for negative self-fulfilling prophecies of failure. In terms of the lifecycle function of life reviews, the human development of every individual is a unique story of how people navigate the interplay of innate purposes and also particular life ambitions in relation to specific situations which are always unique and also ever changing. The experiential foundations of the common lifecycle stages represent a comparative universal basis for each individual to appreciate their own life story as a process or not of sustained integrity in the face of obstacles faced – a more reliable basis for self-evaluation and also self-knowledge than any superficial identity formed or external record of apparent achievement. In later life then, culminating life reviews provide an important key to the function of ‘lifecycle completion’ described by Erikson.

Figure 5 projects an additional model of future education providing two basic contrasts. One is between the modern formal education system (centred around schooling preparing learners or students for higher education) and a wider, emerging, and future integrated framework of lifelong education outlined and discussed further in a related paper as the ‘eight pillars of lifelong education’ (Richards, 2017). The second contrast is between this ‘21C’ lifelong education framework (secondary process) and a related new or emerging paradigm of optimal lifelong learning which is the primary process of both experience and development. In other words, education is not just ultimately ‘assisted learning’ (as Rogers reminds us), but has a primary social function which complements as well as interacts with the primary lifecycle as well as related basic psychological process of lifelong learning. In this way it is the recognised role of future lifelong education to frame, support and encourage optimal learning, constructive knowledge building and reflective practice as performance across a range of formal as well as non-formal and informal learning contexts. This is especially so in terms of how various notions of learning directly from experience at the ‘micro’ level are ultimately related to the experiential learning foundations also of human lifecycle development at the macro level – that is, that the ‘quality of life’ is ultimately linked to the ability to learn from human lived experience by either directly or even indirectly harnessing the ever-immediate ‘quality of experience’.

Thus, an integrated and transformative paradigm of lifelong education might stand as a corrective to the increasingly ineffective, demoralised, and fragmented break-up of the modern paradigm of formal education and related normative models or standards of psychological and/or social identification. In sum, an integrated model of lifelong education is needed to support a lifelong learning antidote to the residual notions that after school people work, retire, and then wait to die bored, depressed and with a growing sense of meaninglessness or disillusionment. The transition to a new paradigm has been given impetus by the strong forces of global change which extend from new requirements of complex problem-solving to imperatives of social and cultural diversity through to the ‘fragmentation’ of old and increasingly inadequate structures of knowledge and education – indeed a 21st-century threshold of change. Just as the hidden curriculum of lifelong education remains ‘socialisation’ even in a fast-changing and globalised world, so too the hidden curriculum of lifelong learning also remains the biological, psychological, and also the higher-order self-knowledge imperatives of human lifecycle development.

Conclusion

The paper has explored a lifelong education framework for better recognising how the micro experiential cycles which are the basis of informal lifelong learning can be regularly, coherently and more confidently harnessed throughout the larger macro dimensions, stages and related functions of meaningful human lifecycle development (i.e. overall life experience). The need for such a framework was linked to the larger background context of an expanding sense of global educational malaise and/or demoralisation in various related terms of knowledge and learning increasingly disconnected from lived or ‘lifecycle’ experience. The paper has built on David Kolb’s insights about the experiential learning process, including his own hints about a possible resolution to the apparent contradiction or dilemma arising from his learning stages model. At the corresponding macro level, it has also adapted Erikson’s revised ‘lifecycle completed’ model of key stages of human development and life experience. On this basis for better appreciating ‘higher order’ learning functions associated with effectively harnessing lived experience at every stage of life, an optimal view of the lifelong learning process might also be transformed into a related integrated model of lifelong education. As further discussed, such a framework not only offers a basis for engaging diverse range of relevant models, educational aspects, and theoretical perspectives, but also a related foundation for better reconciling various oppositional (e.g. psychological vs. social) perspectives on education and learning. In this way, the paper has linked the initial inquiry into the experiential learning process with the challenge of an appropriate and comprehensive framework of 21st-century lifelong education which might better support related decision-making and planning processes for individual resilience and social sustainability in the face of a world of accelerating change and uncertainty which Bauman has usefully referred to as ‘liquid times’.