The 'lifelong learner'

And how it writes a permanent deficit into a child

If you read any education strategy written in the last forty years - maybe in Wellington, or Canada, or the OECD, or a UN development framework - you’ll find the expression ‘lifelong learner’. It’s a relatively recent word, rare before the 1970s and its usage is rapidly growing now, as shown in this Google NGRAM for ‘lifelong learner’:

The term does quiet, constant work, and it appears so often, and even sounds benign until you really stop and think about it.

What does ‘lifelong learner’ really say about the person it describes?

Let’s think… A learner is, by the meaning of the word, someone who doesn’t yet know something. In other words, it’s someone who is defined by what they lack.

Then if we add lifelong at the front, we’ve fixed that lack in place permanently.

So, ‘lifelong learner’ names a human being by a deficit that, by definition, can never be filled, because the moment it gets filled, the person would no longer answer to the name.

The term is effectively a declaration of what a person is, with a permanent insufficiency written into the word.

Now, compare it with the honest word, a child. A child is whole at every stage - whole as an infant, whole at seven, whole at fifteen - the way a seedling is already fully a plant, not a broken tree. The word ‘child’ names a complete being who is growing.

In contrast, ‘lifelong learner’ reduces the child down to a passive, deficient, narrow, sliver.

It names a gap that can never close, by definition. One lets the child arrive and the other forbids it.

That's a category error.

A category error is when you describe something using a quality (or adjective) that belongs to a completely different kind of thing. The mistake isn’t that you’ve got a fact wrong. It’s that you’ve reached for the wrong kind of thing altogether.

It’s easiest to see with something silly. Imagine asking, “what does the colour blue taste like?” or “is Tuesday heavier than Wednesday?” You can’t answer either one - not because you don’t know, but because colours don’t have a taste and days of the week don’t have a weight. Taste belongs to food; weight belongs to physical objects. The questions have taken a quality from one kind of thing and tried to pin it onto another kind of thing where it simply doesn’t belong. Nothing in them is false, exactly. They just don’t fit the thing they’re asking about.

A category error might sound like a small thing when it's about colours and weekdays, but the same mistake can be made about a person, and when it is, it does real harm.

A child isn't travelling towards wholeness in the ‘lifelong learner’ framing. Instead, wholeness has been placed permanently out of reach, because reaching it would mean they're no longer the thing they have been called.

It takes the whole child - who is a being who’s already complete at every stage of growing, and renames the child as a kind of ‘standing insufficiency’, to be serviced for the rest of his/her life.

Ponder what this might be doing to the child’s sense of self.

If we must have a word for the young person in the room, ‘student’ is far better than ‘learner.’

‘Learner’ casts the child as a passive vessel - something to be filled from outside. ‘Student’ casts the child as active - someone applying themselves, reaching toward understanding. One is acted upon; the other acts. And that difference tells you exactly what kind of education each word has in mind.

None of this is an argument against learning all one's life; of course a whole person keeps learning. The error is not the activity but the renaming - turning what a person does into what a person is. And that is a very real and very fundamental example of identity disruption.

Once you see the problems of ‘lifelong learner’, it’s difficult to un-see, and it’s not a small thing. This category error sits beneath a lot of policy that has otherwise resisted explanation.

In my next post, we'll look at what some of the the best minds in education have actually called the young ones who were being educated.