On Mon, 21 Oct 1996, Robert Bacal wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Oct 1996, GSCHERL wrote:
>
> > I think this one statement summarizes what our whole drive in learning
> > or developing is all about. If we weren't interested in changing our
> > position in life, we wouldn't want to learn, we wouldn't want to
> > risk, we wouldn't want to take chances.
>
> I have to disagree with this, at least as a generalization. I don't know
> anyone that doesn't want to learn...and much learning occurs without any
> reasonable expectation of instrumentality (eg. something that could
> change our position in life. I think the perspective that people learn
> only to obtain some result cheapens the notion of learning, and is a
> symptom of our society's switch to instrumentalism. The shifts in
> university focus from learning to employment, I think, is a reflection of
> this belief, and one that is, IMHO, quite scary.
IMHO, people are *constantly* changing their "position in life" without
being aware of it most of the time. The circumstances one lives in don't
stand still, and it takes change on the part of the individual just to
maintain the same relative position. Most of this change is so subtle and
incremental that we usually aren't consciously aware of it, just as a
driver isn't consciously of all the little course corrections he needs to
make just to stay in his lane. We're not talking about the kind of change
where the individual moves between social classes or even tax brackets.
Again IMHO, all human learning *is* motivated by a desire for change;
we're feedback systems, and every feedback system adjusts itself based on
the discrepancy between its current state and its desired state. Again we
may not consciously conceive this discrepancy as such, but it exists, and
the result of reducing it (which is always only a temporary reduction,
since at the micro level, the desired state is always changing) is change.
I'm not really sure there's such a thing as learning or any other human
activity for that matter that's done purely for its own sake (and I'm not
sure that concept is even meaningful); there's always a "result" of some
sort, but it's often a very "little" and subtle one, one that's part of
the fine detail of our lives, not the gross structure of them. The
problem is that in communicating with others, we tend to ignore the
importance of these little things and act as if only the big, highly
visible changes are meaningful. In some ways, everything we do is
preparation for the future; it's just not the "future" that ambitious
middle-class parents wish their kids would be more concerned with (that
"future" really represents a fear of not impressing the neighbors more
than anything else).
--Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@netcom.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>