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International stimuli. More than 25 years of literacy and basic education A look back at the history of literacy discussions as a debate starting in the 1970s and heavily influenced by international organisations. The urgency of the subject is demonstrated at the start by international figures on the extent of illiteracy. The author sees today’s questions and issues as rooted in the 1980s and 1990s; in his overview of the German government's current funding focus he points out that there is…
Effects of continuing education tests Continuing education tests aim at improving transparency of the quality of programmes on offer and initiating processes to improve quality at providers of continuing education. But what has the impact of continuing education tests been to date? The authors present selected results of an evaluation study. From a demand perspective, continuing education has not been transparent since the introduction of educational testing in 2002, either. 54% of the popul…
The paratext of biographical interviews This article profiles everything which the biography researcher intentionally prompts or unintentionally receives during field work from his interview partners in the way of “paratext” which contributes to the design of the subject of research. Thus a notion which is usually used in the field of literature science is in this manner adopted in biographical research.
Voluntary Commitment and Learning. Results of a Survey on Volunteers by the Federal Government The Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth’s (BMFSFJ) survey on volunteers, carried out in 1999 and 2004, shows that voluntary work is on the rise, especially in the area of work with young people and adult education. Learning motives play a major role in voluntary commitments. Technical expertise is also considered to be important, but more so by men than by women. O…
The notion of lifelong learning is reshaping the structural principle according to which learning is organised in the time structures of society. Long periods of time spent in schools are becoming more flexible, with shorter sections of ordered learning times being distributed throughout people’s lives and more flexible transitions taking place between work and learning. The three-phase scheme for working life – training, work and retirement – is becoming more flexible. The LLL concept can be s…
The author diagnoses the dynamics of acceleration in our society in three parts: technological acceleration, which results in a “destruction of space”, accelerated social change, which leads to a “shrinkage of the present”, and – as a result of both of these trends – an acceleration in the subjective perception of time. The “society on the move” creates a pressure to make use of as many options in life as possible. The author shows that only deciding not to exploit all these options can help e…
