Europe of knowledge. Actors and contexts of lifelong learning policies in Italy and France

The emphasis of the new spirit of capitalism about “employability” has affected the european educational policies of the last decades (Boltanski, Chiapello, 2005). In particular, at Community level, the rhetoric of lifelong learning has been always linked to a strong neo-liberal sense, emphasizing the presence of both winners and losers, as the inevitable result of a changing economy (Holford, 2008). Within a political agenda strongly oriented to conceive a new stra-tegic vision for the realization of the welfare measures, Lifelong learn-ing is actually the focus of the new social policies (Griffin, 2002). In this sense, if learnfare is the promotion of skills through lifelong learn-ing (De Luca Picione, 2015), a reform of the educational system con-cerning the whole period of formal studies, from the first years of school to the higher education experiences and lifelong training, is of primary importance (Giddens, 2014). How to rethink the policies of Adult education in the XXI century in the different national contexts? (Milana, 2017). The study that is presented here, as a result of a substantive curiosi-ty about the mechanisms and processes that have guided social action of the institutions of Italy and France in the path towards the estab-lishment of the national system of adult education in a lifelong learn-ing perspective emphasizing the role of various actors in different lo-cal contexts in which policies are implemented, is located in this per-spective. Given the need for shared survey on social basic tools and the actu-al function of capacitation of these interventions, that are able to offer a structured framework, rooted in reality (Holford, 2014) of the trajec-tories of inclusion / exclusion of citizens-users, who do not disregard the recognition of "voices" of learners (Formenti, 2014), we propose the first empirical evidence of exploratory field survey on the adult population.