Equality and human capital: Conflicting concepts within state-funded adult education in Ireland.

This article offers a critique of the concept of equality as it informs the White Paper on Adult Education: Learning for Life (2000). It also outlines the extent to which human capital theory can be seen to have effectively colonised lifelong learning from the outset of its adoption by the European Union with highly constraining implications for state-funded adult education in Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]