Opening up the ideologies in “Learning: The Treasure Within”

A quarter of a century after the 1972 Faure Report, UNESCO’s International
Commission on Education for the 21st Century launched a wide range of
policy dialogues to recap the original idea of lifelong learning in the Faure
Report. The result of these dialogues, “Learning: The Treasure Within” also
known as the Delors Report, proposed updating UNESCO’s lifelong learning
policy. Even though ideology is an inevitable social force that substantially
conditions our epistemology on educational issues, still, little is known about
the ideologies embedded in the Delors Report. With that in mind, this study,
utilizing the concept of policy as discourse, reveals which ideological influences
within the Delors Report have been marked as authoritative and which as
marginal. Implications for lifelong learning policy are discussed.