This study on lifelong learning addresses the question of possible tension between sociopolitical expectations for the population’s continued learning on one hand, and individuals’ personal interest in recognizing and improving their own skills/competences and applying them to their own personal goals and plans, on the other.
Since the second half of the 20th century, the concept of lifelong learning has increased in significance. In the 1970s, UNESCO, the OECD, and the German Educational Council developed programs for this purpose, with the aim of developing people’s subjective potential while also promoting their adaptation to changing socioeconomic conditions. After the Maastricht Treaty went into effect in 1992, the European Union was empowered, albeit to a limited extent, to become active in the politics of general and professional education. Since then, numerous documents on lifelong learning have been written, describing it as a decisive factor for the socioeconomic future of Europe in the age of knowledge, as well as a guiding principal for general and professional education. In these documents, numerous expectations regarding the learning of in-dividuals were formulated. In an additional step, instruments were developed to assess qualifications, skills, and abilities in a transparent and comprehensible way, to ensure the quality of the processes, and to monitor project implementation.
In Germany, the federal government‘s Lifelong Education for All initiative was a response to the programs and aims of the EU. As part of this initiative, funding from the European Social Fund was used to develop the ProfilPASS competence assessment procedure. It can be used to make visible and document knowledge and skills/competences informally acquired in settings that may be outside of educational institutions in various contexts and at various ages. The ProfilPASS procedure is supported by personal advisement. ProfilPASS’s structure, its origins and history, and the advisement concept behind it will be described in detail in this paper.
To address the research question above, the first step was to extract and categorize frequently mentioned requirements regarding people’s abilities from eight EU documents on lifelong learning; in a second step, these were compared with the contents of completed ProfilPASSes. In addition to the competences identified by the persons themselves who completed the ProfilPASS, their motivation for completing the procedure, their aims, and the degree of intensity with which they completed the procedure were examined. Two written surveys of participants in the study provided information about their insights resulting from the ProfilPASS procedure, the personal meaning which the skills identified had for the persons completing the procedure, and possible consequences from having completed the procedure.
Works by Michel Foucault serve as a theoretical foundation, with the focus on the theory of governmentality, Foucault’s theories on the relationship between power and subject, and his studies on technologies of the self. Using these, the EU’s concept of lifelong learning and the ProfilPASS concept are defined in theoretical terms, and the relevance and explanatory power of the empirical study’s results are derived. The results of the empirical study show a strong correlation between the competences identified and the EU’s requirements regarding the lifelong learning of its citizens, as well as the interest of the persons completing the ProfilPASS procedure in their own employability. There were also dissonances with the expectations directed at them. | English |
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