Adult Education - the phrase conjures up the image of people (mainly housewives) going out for a few hours at night once or twice a week to learn the mysteries of pottery, flower-arranging, crochet, cooking or calligraphy. However, the whole raison d'etre of adult education and its place in the education system has changed utterly.
Skill is the new currency of economic assets. Manufacturing industry is no longer the basis for longterm employment in developed economies. In the post-industrial era, the potential of a country to initiate and maintain economic activity will increasingly depend on the skills of its workforce.
Countries with highly-skilled and educated workforces will possess the same comparative strategic advantages this century as those with highly-developed infrastructure, oil reserves and mineral deposits did in the past. This economic imperative will have the most profound consequences for the education system.
The tradition that when people learned their trade in the job they could safely expect to retire on a pension when they reached 65 has all but vanished. The last century witnessed the obsolescence of many of the skills which people acquired over hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of years.
In fact, many of the new skills which came into demand relatively recently have also disappeared almost as quickly.
Workers must now accept the reality that the nature of their occupation will change several times during their working lives. The notion of a job for life, even of a skill for life, has become as extinct as the dinosaurs.
The key to the future is flexibility. As conditions change, as new employment opportunities open up and old ones close down, people must be able to adapt to what the market demands.
How quickly they adapt will depend on their education and training and on the ability of the education system to respond to their needs. In other words, anybody who wants to remain employable must be prepared to keep on learning throughout his or her life.
The concept of security of employment has been replaced by that of security of employability. Any country that wants to remain at the forefront of economic development must have a workforce of adaptable, employable people and a fully adaptable education system.
To achieve the flexibility to react to ever more rapidly changing employment conditions, workers must have ready access to education and training throughout their working lives. Educational institutions will have to accompany students throughout their working lives rather than merely preparing them for their working lives.
In short, the State is obliged to provide a system of lifelong learning. The Green Paper signalled this; the White Paper is a watershed.
Lifelong learning means a critical departure from the traditional role of educational institutions. It implies providing learning opportunities over a lifespan rather than merely in the early years, and widening recognition to embrace new forms of learning.
It implies that learning takes place in a range of settings rather than just the traditional educational institutions (schools and colleges); encouraging greater links between education and industry; establishing identifiable links between the formal education sector and the various informal sectors which have multiplied in recent years. It also implies providing more flexible forms of education.
Lifelong learning is not just about economic success, however, it is also about social justice and social cohesion. Education can play a key role in the promotion of equality of opportunity or in the perpetuation of poverty. Poverty is not just about the unequal distribution of wealth.
Those who are economically poor tend also to be excluded from those centres of decision-making which affect their lives most profoundly. They are isolated from services, structures and planning processes.
Their needs are often overlooked within a broader development agenda. Easy and meaningful access to education will enable the excluded to develop their capacity to participate more effectively in society.
Much of the adult education agenda in the past 20 years has concentrated on building the capacity of communities, groups and individuals to make or at least influence decisions which affect their lives. Acquiring this capacity obviously involves continuous access to information.
The rate of participation in adult education in this country (23 per cent) is only about half the European average. The proposals unveiled in the White Paper represent a determined attempt to remove as many as possible of the barriers which stand in the way of people returning to education.
I do not seek to pretend that we can remove them all at once. For example, in the consultation process which followed the publication of the Green Paper, there was criticism of the decision to continue to charge fees for certain categories of the adult student cohort (i.e. non-unemployed, non-welfare recipients) and the proposal to continue with fees for third-level part-time students.
The unpalatable reality is that the number of adults in the population with less than upper secondary education (over 1.1 million people or 46 per cent of the adult population) is simply too large to have a general free fees approach. In addition, it would risk displacing existing investment (from both employers and participants) in the 170,000 students who already participate in self-funded night-time adult education classes each year.
The priorities are twofold: firstly, to concentrate available resources on those most at risk who face most difficulty in paying fees; and secondly, to build the core services which are still relatively under-developed. While we cannot remove all the barriers at once, we are assisting the most disadvantaged to surmount them.
The task now is to provide speedily the resources to enable Ireland to conquer this remaining educational frontier. We must do so not to meet the challenge of the future, because the future is already here.
Willie O'Dea is the Minister of State with responsibility for Adult Education