FROM President Obama's recent speech on education to the European Union's education strategy, lifelong learning is treated as a panacea to the reform of global education. Lifelong learning rests on the premise that conventional forms of education or learning, which end at a particular age, are no longer adequate in preparing our citizens to keep up with the advent of new technologies in this rapidly changing world. As formulated by Unesco in the 1970s and pushed for by the OECD and the European Union in the 1990s, lifelong learning has become the "new Jerusalem" in global policy talk. This is no different in the revival of education reform in Thailand.