of theory that are not commensurate with the evidence of my practice. However, to have my ideas taken seriously, and legitimised as of worth, I need to have your validation that the form and content of my work has a use value. I need you to judge whether I am rigorous in my evaluation, whether I use standards of judgement that are based in rationality and social justice; and whether I use clear criteria to test out the theories which I draw from my own practice against established views. In this paper, I am suggesting that established ideas about lifelong education - how it is conceptualised, how it is theorised, and how it is supported - proceed from a degenerate view both of the nature of reality and of the forms of enquiry that are used to describe and explain the nature of that reality. The paper offers some ideas towards such a reconceptualisation of lifelong education, in terms of the issues outlined above. These issues appear in an interrelated fashion. The evidence of this interrelationship is presented in excerpts from the real-life narrative of a group of people whose personal and social practices are constrained by the established culture. One aspect of the established culture is that of the academy as the locus of power-knowledge. Issues of access and legitimacy The legitimation of knowledge is a privilege of the academy. Access to legitimate knowledge is through routes to the academy. Many sectors of the academy regard propositional knowledge as