Lifelong Learning and Continuing Education as a Complex and Interdisciplinary Framework for the 21st Century

The adult education movement was able to define its aims thanks to the discussion work in the field of some international conferences promoted by UNESCO in the second half of the twentieth century: starting with the Elseneur conference in 1949, then in Montreal in 1960 and in Tokyo in 1972, international meetings attended by up to seventy-nine states. The goal of adult education was essentially seen as the massive literacy of populations, as one of the fundamental areas of post-war reconstruction and the development of democracy. Already in the history of pedagogy, from humanism to the tenth ninth century, thanks above all to the work of some ‘enlightened’ pedagogists (Erasmus of Rotterdam, Comenius, Montaigne and Rousseau), and to educational movements of some philanthropic groups (Don Giovanni Bosco, Fourier and others), the sensitivity to the subject was forged above all as a work of a humanitarian approach and care for the opportunities for liberation of the peasant and proletarian population.