L4D Learning for Democracy

In discussions about learning, schooling is often confused with learning. The advocates of schooling have a vested interest in maintaining the image that schooling is synonymous with learning since school and university are said to be privileged places of learning. And although these places are devoted to learning that fact should not conceal the cost of the institutionalisation of learning in terms of time, effort and perspective at the expense of learning. As this article is about the dissolution of boundaries, it might seem odd to begin with the need to maintain what might be seen as a boundary. Yet we need to make a clear distinction between schooling and learning if we are to look lucidly at how the dissolution of boundaries affects the structures that go to make up schooling and through them the learning that takes places within their territories and between schools and elsewhere. We also need to be able to look at learning as an activity that can potentially take place anywhere and at any time as well as both in the real and the virtual world. We need to understand how the dissolution of boundaries affects that learning in particular in its relationship to more formal learning and in the recognition it receives from society.

Schooling is a complex activity that requires adhesion to the constraints of an institutional setting and involves taking part in a number of ritualised activities. Note that the dictionary says of rituals, amongst other things: a series of actions or types of behaviour regularly and invariably followed by someone.  The convening of regular meetings in a set place, the strict segmentation of time, the division into disciplines and the orchestrated control of knowledge acquisition are just some of the activities integrated into the weekly, daily or hourly routine as repeated rituals. Part of the constraint is the so-called hidden curriculum that vehicles a number of underlying lessons (see Nine lessons of schooling). These "lessons", partly embedded in the rituals mentioned above, dictate a specific relationship to learning in terms of the rarefaction of knowledge, the isolation, fragmentation and packaging of knowledge without which it is said to be much more difficult to learn, the dependence on expert knowledge and the localisation and isolation of learning. Although learning is considered to be the major activity in schooling, the actual time spent on learning in the context of schooling is limited and debatably effective in the long term. Of the learning that does take place within the perimeter of schooling, a sizeable part of it is unintended or not valid from the perspective of the institution. 

In comparison, learning is an activity in which the individual or a group seeks to build new knowledge or new ways of working, where that newness is with respect to the person or group developing it. The nature of this knowledge may be formal or informal. The learning may be embedded, almost unrecognisable as such, in other activities, for example as part of a wider non-learning project. It may take place by osmosis, absorbed almost effortlessly in contact with others or a given situation. Or it may be a deliberate strategy, not necessarily driven by need but by personal interest or a passion for learning. There may be regular ways in which this learning takes place, what Etienne Wenger and others call "practices", but even in these cases, learning will invariably differ from context to context and from situation to situation. Learning is generally not ritualised, but adapts and evolves anew on each new occasion according to the circumstances. This fact raises the question of the appropriateness of schooling in its current form as conducive to learning in that much schooling seeks to standardise the experience of learning.

school, learning, lessons

Last updated 384 days ago by Alan McCluskey