Lifelong learning is a voluntary process people take up in order to replace or add new knowledge for personal or professional reasons. It is a particular kind of  education that starts from school and ends after the retirement and keep people continuously involved in the process to conform to the new social and economical contexts. Many studies, in fact, since 1970s shown the importance of lifelong learning in globalization and integration process.

First of all lifelong learning is a requirement for jobs. As no one can hope to hold an office for all life, lifelong learning is fundamental to adapt yourself yo the new necessary skills. This learning, in fact, was firstly proposed to miners in order to adeguate them to the new security and technological standards.

Above all, the great achievement of this scheme of learning is to have realized a great contamination of different knowledge that, until few years ago, did not cooperate together. It must have  been clear also from a political point of view, as the EU completely changed its learning plans, opening to the so called Lifelong Learning Programme, which replaced the old Socrates or Leonardo. According to LLP, EU gives people the possibility to wider knowledge, also by travelling from a country to another. Its main aims are to open different educational systems, better their quality and efficiency and make them accessible and simple.

For all these reasons the number of non-formal learning considerably grown in last decades. People do not limit themselves to the education given by their schools and universities, but decide to open to extra-curricular activities and learnings. Sometimes they issue a certificate that, according to the changing necessities of our world, have a very short expiration date, meaning the necessity to keep oneself up to date.

As I am completely in favour of this larning scheme, I believe that we do not have to force people to prepare themselves to longlife learning. In fact, they are already spured by the society to do this in order not to be out of it and its new challenges. If they do not, they will not be able to integrate themselves from a social, working and cultural points of view.