Learning to Learn
Our education and training culture seems to work on the basis that to learn, one has to be taught. In school, it starts ever earlier. Shortly, provision is being opened for nine-month-olds to be supported with “free” childcare in nursery settings, and already the signs are there that assessment will follow closely behind, so that “value” can be demonstrated, measured and compared. And so it begins; we are inculcated into a world of learning that others must instigate and judge, regardless of domain.
If it’s brain surgery or anything else that involves high levels of personal risk to well-being, I’m all for it. In many other areas, however, it seems less about risk mitigation and more about power and control. Our attitude to learning is socially constructed, and the danger is that we introduce its dark side, which is learned helplessness.
Those of us who have children and grandchildren or were children once will recognise this. Somewhere between year two and the end of school, creativity and originality are replaced by performance anxiety, and we end up with a huge training sector trying to inculcate creativity and innovation into those from whom it has been surgically removed.
That might have been acceptable even a few decades ago when our economies were more closed systems. Manufacturing was the dominant industry, processes provided the engine of growth, and the Toyota Production System was the undisputed champion. Our focus was on teaching processes to people in order to drive productivity. Probably unintentionally, we put learning in a box, and anything we learned outside that box had no place in the system. Then, of course, we had globalisation and the ready availability of cheaper boxes elsewhere, and those with bounded skills were left with few places to take them.
As any early years teacher will tell us, the most important aspect of learning is developing an appetite for it, on our own terms, for the joy of it. Now, with an almost unlimited infrastructure available at minimal cost, we can learn what we want, when, and how we want. Where I went to school, Latin was not an option, so I’m learning it now, for the hell of it (and its insight into the origin of the language we use) for about a pound a week and enjoying it.
I think our formal learning structures are sclerotic. On the news today, UK Universities starved of other funding are apparently prioritising overseas students because they pay around four times the fees of those who live here. That’s not a criticism of them—they are logical market actors identifying an easy cash crop—but it rather robs them of social credibility. Our businesses constrain training to the essential minimum compatible with financial returns. That’s not a criticism of them—they are logical market actors identifying an easy cash crop—but it rather robs them of social credibility.
Learning is a mycelial activity. It connects what is needed to where it is to be found. As with agriculture, ploughing fields in search of short-term performance destroys soil health and mycelial growth, yet that is what our organisations do to those inside their walls.
Qualifications can be a double-edged sword. They permit us to do something we have no passion for in pursuit of money, status and acceptance. This is understandable but questionable as people can get to mid-career to find that the exponential growth curve they envisaged is, in fact, anything but, and they can see to the horizon of a job they don’t love.
We are born to think and learn on our own terms, not other people’s. It carries the possibility and responsibility of becoming who we can be, as against those with an agenda who would like us to be someone else, more convenient to them.
Perhaps that is the burden of the artisan - to be what we can be and take responsibility for it.