ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with an issue that lies at the heart of this book – the boundaries between everyday or experiential learning and formal education. An earlier version was written as a contribution to a book entitled Re-theorising the Recognition of Prior Learning (Andersson and Harris 2006). For a sociologist who has not worked in the field of adult education, and has only been very marginally involved in RPL itself, I found the collection of papers refreshing and provocative even when I disagreed with some of the arguments. Many of the papers give insights into the dilemmas and difficulties faced by RPL practitioners in a range of different countries. However, they also provide concrete and specific ways of raising the much broader educational issues concerned with learning, knowledge and pedagogic authority which other chapters of this book have tried to address.
