The Faure report, Sylvia Wynter and the undoing of the Man of lifelong learning

It is rare in contemporary times to encounter international education policy reports that inspire hope and excitement for the future, such as we are offered in the 1972 report of the International Commission on the Development of Education set up by UNESCO in 1971 and chaired by Edgar Faure. Learning to be: The world of education today and tomorrow, also known as the Faure report, is both philosophical and “of a practical nature”, aiming “to lead to action”. Faure and his collaborators offered governments, scholars and educational actors evocative concepts for a society-to-come, such as lifelong education (and later, lifelong learning), the learning society, international solidarity and personalised learning. Animating the report and its imaginary of lifelong learning is “the ideal of the complete man”, a modernist project to realise Man’s destiny at the centre of the universe. The Faure report and the ideal of lifelong learning continue to inspire education policy today. But in the context of climate crisis and deeper global inequality, what kind of enabling future is possible under the guidance of the exclusionary story of Man-as-human? To what extent can the Faure report continue to inspire? This article brings the Faure report’s utopia of Man into conversation with Black feminist theorist Sylvia Wynter, exploring the idea central to Wynter’s work that if learning is the way out of perpetual crises, of socio-biological collapse, a force for equity, democracy and justice that the authors of the Faure report envisioned it to be, then it must be de-coupled from the overrepresented, biocentric, ‘referent-we’ of Man-as-human. Wynter proposes a different future for humanness. The article concludes by speculating what this future might suggest for the material grounding of scholarly practices in adult education and beyond.