Understanding the evolving context for lifelong education: global trends, 1950 – 2020

Lifelong education is comprised of four broad categories of activity: early childhood education, primary and secondary schooling, tertiary studies, and adult education. Patterns of people’s engagement with each category of lifelong education differ substantially between countries and are influenced by widely varying public policies and institutional settings. While recognising the tremendous diversity of lifelong education around the world, this article describes a dramatic global expansion of formal schooling in recent decades, links that expansion to demographic, social, and economic changes, and highlights persistent inequalities between and within countries. The goal of this article is to provide a context for understanding the evolution of lifelong education by carefully documenting the history of key global trends over the past seventy years. Data are national-level quantitative indicators, compiled by United Nations organisations such as the World Bank, UNESCO, and the ILO, and organised to enable the comparison of trends between major world regions. The analysis and presentation of this data focus on enabling scholars and practitioners of lifelong education to understand how their field has evolved in concert with global patterns of social change. The article’s conclusions challenge such scholars and practitioners to contest the reproduction of inequality through education.