Learning is not the problem
Graduation versus Learning. People don’t want to learn they wan’t to graduate. This isn’t their fault. In fact its ours. If we wanted people to learn we’d tell them to go read wikipedia, read the bible, read the works of shakespeare, read Jung, Popper, Knuth, Shirkey, Taleb, Buddah, Confuscius, Kawasaki, Seuss, Ellroy, Dawkins, Poe, De Mello, Buffet, Baudrillard, Diamond, de Chardin, Herbert, Tolkien, Milton ; Listen to Bach, Tool, Domino, Earl, Dylan, Credence, Coltraine, White, Porter; get a job, get a life, make a friend, make an enemy, open your eyes close your eyes, watch tv, watch the wind, shout out loud, say nothing. The degree to which we confuse and conflate learning and graduation, that is to say idealisied learning (platonic) and institutional learning (socialisation) is clear when we consider turning the question “how can we learn better?” on its head and instead ask the ludicrious question “how can we learn worse?”. It is clear that no matter what we do we learn. We can’t help it. It’s just how we’re wired. Learning is clearly not the problem.
Could the problem be employment legislation? Because employers cannot easily get rid of employees who cannot do their jobs they need certification bodies to verify skills so they depend on qualifications from ‘reputable’ institutions. Our real job is not to teach but to verify that learning has taken place. We shouldn’t complain - it keeps us in work.
I hadn’t really thought about employment legislation Brian. Something to mull over.
I do agree that our job is to a large extent about verifying that learning has taken place (though this view is not uncontroversial). For instance I am becoming attracted to the behaviourist view (which is very unfashionable in education research), that is that I don’t care to a large degree whether deep or meaningful learning has taken place as long as someone can pass a test. That in itself is a good skill, *provided* that the test is a good one. And this involves the use of creative testing and changing the tests regularly and continually monitoring for cheating. Or maybe what I mean is that I don’t care what goes on inside a person’s head, what their epsitomoloy, ontology, any other olgies they have as they are private matters for a person. The learner head is a black box and we should’t look inside!