Adult Education and Learning in a Precarious Age: The Hamburg Declaration Revisited. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, Number 138

UNESCO’s 1997 CONFINTEA V conference in Hamburg has been described as the high-water mark of international adult education policy-making. It produced one of the most utopian statements about adult education and learning of the past 25 years: the Hamburg Declaration on Adult Learning and Agenda for the Future. Adult education was declared key to the twenty-first century in order to build “a world in which violent conflict is replaced by dialogue, a culture of peace based on justice . . . and the creation of a learning society committed to social justice and general well-being.” However, the Declaration also recognized that there were many practical challenges to its implem…