I firmly believe education is a lifelong process and base this viewpoint on my own experience.
When I finished my five years at high school I decided I wanted to be a primary school teacher and was accepted into my local Teachers College for the two year training course.  However, since I was also motivated to get a deeper academic understanding of my chosen profession, I also enrolled at university to study Education as a part-time student.  The combination was a challenge, of course, but nothing like the challenge of maintaining that level of education after I began the actual teaching fulltime in the classroom.  So, after three years of part-time study, I resigned from my teaching position and went to university fulltime.  I am convinced that the extra experience and maturity behind me made me a more diligent and motivated studentand that was reflected in higher grades than I had been achieving up to that point.
This belief system, that it was important to keep improving my skills and knowledge, led me to engage in further study on the needs of dyslexic students and how to teach them when I started teaching remedial reading in my home after my own children were born.   This educational process was begun on a need to know basis to cope with individual students who were failing in the school system.  I discovered this is a great motivation for engaging in learning.
I have been told that sometimes we teach what we need to learn, which sounds a little cynical to me, especially since my next foray into on-going education was when I volunteered to work for Marriage Guidance in my early thirties.  A significant payback was the excellent training involved as I acquired the skills to facilitate others learning about personal relationships and communication. It also seemed a useful way to maximise the spare time and energy I had as a fulltime mother, with a supportive husband who encouraged me to get involved and expand my horizons.  The reality was that this experience did eventually lead to a whole new career path for me.
I must add that I was already learning so much more about child development and parenting at the time through my commitment with my children at Play Centre, a community preschool NGO run by parents for their children.  I would argue that the organisation was a very good example of second chance education because parents who had not achieved highly academically at school were able to get practical certificates crediting their new knowledge and skills in early childhood education.  Many women who later became involved in public life attribute their confidence to the experience/education they received to chair meetings and run an NGO.
For my fortieth birthday my husband gave me an amazing gift -- a nine day course at Outward Bound!   Talk about an education process!  Ostensibly it is about facing physical challenges, overcoming fear and dealing with perceived risks , such as, kayaking, rock climbing, sailing, marathon running, bush walking, a frightening confidence course not to mention solo sleeping in the bush! But, really, it is so much more than that.  It is about teamwork, cooperation, pushing past ones self-imposed limits and gaining self-knowledge...and the age range of our group?  27 to 56 years old!  I came away with new-found confidence in myself to be able to take risks and know that I would survive whether successful or not, a very liberating discovery!
In my fifties I thought about how I could extend my career, building on my experience in the justice system and decided I would like to get involved in social science research.  That meant I would have to up-skill.and so it was back to part time university to study Statistics and Social Science under-graduate papers in order to meet the pre-requisites for MA level papers.   I had not studied Maths at high school and wondered whether it really was possible to teach an old dog new tricks. It is!
Some of these examples of experiencing education as a lifelong process are examples of formal, institutional education, while others involved more informal, but still professional, community organisations.  Other examples of how education can be an on-going part of life are community education opportunities, such as attending an adult night class in the Excel computer programme (because I knew nothing about spread-sheets) and setting up a very successful night class in women writers (because I knew a lot of other fulltime mothers were at home reading these books and would enjoy the chance to discuss them.)
Now in my (very early!!) sixties, part of my lifelong educational process is dealing with the everyday challenges of living in a foreign country, handicapped by not speaking the language; but able to appreciate all the learning that is going on for me daily as I am introduced to a totally different culture, environment and a wonderful new set of people.