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

• 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
• ISSN: 0260-1370; 1464-519X
• DOI: 10.1080/02601370.2020.1801868

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.