Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?

This book challenges international policy ‘groupthink’ about lifelong learning. Adult learning – too long a servant of business competitiveness – should be reimagined as central to democratic society. Young adults, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds, engage more in education and training, and learn more day-to-day at work, if provision is democratically organised and based on enduring and inclusive institutional networks, and when jobs encourage and reward the acquisition of skills. Using innovative qualitative and quantitative methods, the contributors develop a critical perspective on dominant policies, investigating – across the European Union and Australia – how ‘vulnerable’ young adults experience programmes designed to improve their ‘employability’, and how ‘skills for jobs’ policies squeeze out wider – and wiser – ideas of what education and training should do.