Mapping a pre-global history of lifelong education with Google Books: 1839 - 1959

In most of the scholarly work, the history of lifelong education (LLE) begins in the 1960s, when the concept gathered momentum as part of the agendas of the OECD, World Bank, UNESCO, and Council of Europe. A pre-1960s history is acknowledged with a few names and dates and is generally absorbed into...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of lifelong education 2020-11, Vol.39 (5-6), p.445-464
Main Author: Ignatovich, Elena
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult Learning
Citizenship
Classification
Data Collection
Discourse Analysis
Educational Change
Educational History
Foreign Countries
Gender Issues
Google Books
history
Individual Development
Lifelong education
Lifelong Learning
Ngram Viewer
Periodicals
Professional Development
Religious Education
Role of Education
Social Class
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Summary:In most of the scholarly work, the history of lifelong education (LLE) begins in the 1960s, when the concept gathered momentum as part of the agendas of the OECD, World Bank, UNESCO, and Council of Europe. A pre-1960s history is acknowledged with a few names and dates and is generally absorbed into the history of adult education. This paper presents new data that suggests revising the history of the conceptualisation of LLL and LLE prior to 1960. In 2018 and 2019, the author ran a series of queries on Google Books Search with the terms lifelong education and lifelong learning that turned up results for 161 unique documents published in the UK and the USA between 1839 and 1959. This paper is an overview and a preliminary analysis of the retrieved data that falls within public, academic, official, and creative discourses. Two groups of results are discussed: 1) the body of displayed documents and 2) the approaches, advantages, and limitations of collecting and examining the Google Books data as part of a term-based concept analysis. This study adds to the pre-global history of LLE in the UK and the USA and lays the groundwork for further exploration of the topic.
ISSN:0260-1370
1464-519X
DOI:10.1080/02601370.2020.1801868