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eronica McGivney’s research into men’s learning in the UK was groundbreaking in articulating what was previously unspeakable. For

a range of reasons, the wellbeing of many men was being adversely affected through not being exposed to the known, multiple benefits of lifelong and life-wide learning. For around 50 years in many countries, including Australia, men have tended to be missing from dedicated learning organisations, beyond learning through or related to paid work. This situation, even in adult and

24 ADULTS LEARNING APRIL 2011

community education organisations, in which access was seen to be relatively open to men, had come to be seen as normal and difficult to change. When I first started researching in this area a decade ago, I was assured that men were missing because they were not interested in learning. While I now know that this assurance, based on recent research, is largely untrue, the reasons for its untruth, as for many other social phenomena, are far from simple. In the wake of the 2009 Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning (IFFL)

in the UK and Learning Through Life, its main report, it is important to address the disturbing fact that education can and does sometimes reinforce inequalities. As Leisha Fullick put it in her IFLL thematic paper, Poverty reduction and lifelong learning, ‘the explosion in training and education in recent times has itself contributed to the diminishing status of people who are poor, unskilled and unqualified’. In some senses, the increasing formality of higher forms of learning and the literacies needed to access them are in themselves disadvantaging to adults who