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An editorial is presented on lifelong learning policy making. Topics include highlighting the renewed importance of skills development and lifelong learning as the key enablers of human development for ensuring full, productive, and freely chosen employment; and right to education needs to be broadened in encompassing lifelong learning and the right to information, culture, science, and connectivity.

The article offers information on lifelong education, social inequality and the COVID-19 health pandemic. Topics include examines that Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen were awarded the inaugural Nobel prize for economics in recognition of their work developing dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes.

The authors present information on a vision for education for the twenty-first century called "Rethinking Education: Towards a Global Common Good?," published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). They say this was built in the spirit of two past UNESCO publications: "Learning to Be: The World of Education Today and Tomorrow" and "Learning: The Treasure Within."

Can adult educational research on learning and identity counter the individualising of neoliberal government policy that seeks to constrain educational 'choices' to those that contribute to government economic agendas? This article notes the recent move within post-compulsory education research towards an engagement with Bourdieu because of perceived limitations in the research and analysis of learner identities. In particular, Bourdieu is drawn upon as a conceptual resource in order adequately to account for the influence of social structure as well as agency. We contextualise our exploration of this conceptual move by outlining the way hegemonic policy discourses work to economise the field of UK education and training, specifically the cultivation of particular dispositions towards learning — the 'responsible learner'. We focus on a strand of work that has engaged with Bourdieu's conceptual framework in order to provide a social-structural account of learner experiences. We do this through a brief exploration of the development of the concepts of 'learning career' and 'learning culture'. We ask to what extent the concepts of learning 'career' and 'culture' have worked, and argue that analysis of social structure deployed through these concepts, particularly the immanence of structure in the practices of adult learners, is less well developed. The article concludes with an outline of some new research questions to understand how adults engage with formal learning, specifically whether or not they are responsible learners and reflexive agents and what are the forms and meanings of these notions of responsibility and reflexivity. In setting out this research agenda we hope to contribute to furthering counter-hegemonic research on adults' learning in a context of social and economic structural change, and to avoid being 'captured by the discourse'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a policy push in several countries to encourage more evidence‐based practice in education, although current knowledge shows that the relationship between education research and policy‐practice is problematic. In spite of this, educational organizations have to respond to the challenges of globalisation with new pedagogic models to teach new things to new people in new ways. Therefore, researchers are being asked to consider new ways of relating with users. This article examines these ‘new ways’ in the context of a policy initiative for English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) in the UK where, as in other countries, there is a need to provide access to learning for migrants. A qualitative methodology has been used to reflect on the outcomes of a project that researched the experiences of learners and tutors in order to outline pedagogy for learning computer‐based ESOL. Characteristics of research‐policy relationships that ‘work’ by building a researcher‐user community of practice are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on our complex understanding of knowledge and learning. The authors discuss procedural knowledge and implicit learning, explore an experiment conducted by British psychologist Lawrence Weiskrantz, and examine the scientific and philosophic differences between the brain and the mind.