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...
