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The changing meanings of lifelong learning policies: consequences for young adults and their life courses

Lifelong learning policies have multiple meanings. They change across time, space, theoretical perspectives, and the types of actors that seek to make sense of them. This poses challenges to developing a research framework able to capture the myriad of understandings of lifelong learning ‘policy’. Furthermore, it defies coordinated policy-making and assessing its effects. This chapter aims to gauge such diversity and discuss its consequences for European young adults and their life courses. The chapter then moves on to, and concludes with, a discussion of how the tensions in the ‘growth and inclusion’ agenda interconnect with the movement from standardisation towards de-standardisation in the lives of young adults. In other words, we seek not only to provide an answer to 1) how de-standardisation is taken into account in European lifelong learning policies, but also to 2) how such policies impact and transform the lives of young adults.