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Editor's Letter - April 2007

“Education only begins when the learner is willing to take a risk”

One of the most remarkable changes to take place in the field of education over the past two decades, writes Gert Biesta in this month’s Adults Learning, has been ‘the rise of the concept of “learning” and the simultaneous decline of the concept of “education”’. Teaching, he writes, has been ‘redefined as supporting or facilitating learning’, while education has been ‘redescribed as providing learning experiences and opportunities for learning’. The emergence of the ‘new language of learning’, Biesta argues, is ‘related to wider socio-political developments, particularly the erosion of the welfare state and the rise of the market ideology of neo-liberalism’, which has emphasised ‘the individual responsibility of all citizens to take care of their own lives, including their own learning’. It has become the duty of citizens to engage in learning throughout their lives.

One of the problems with all of this, Biesta writes, is that it has left us with a terribly impoverished educational vocabulary, which fails to capture the complexities of educational processes and relationships. Relationships between teachers and students are understood as ‘economic transactions’ in which the learner is the potential consumer whose ‘needs’ the educator is to supposed to meet. In the language of learning, education becomes a ‘commodity’, delivered by teachers and consumed by learners.

This understanding of education misconstrues both the role of the learner and the role of the educator: ‘It forgets that a major reason for engaging in education is to find out what it is that one wants or needs, and it forgets that educational professionals have a crucial role to play in the process of needs definition’. A language for education should recognise that in every form of learning encounter there is a risk – a risk that you will learn something that you couldn’t imagine either learning or wanting to learn. Education ‘begins when the learner is willing to take a risk’.

Through our learning, says Biesta, ‘we bring aspects of ourselves into the world and, ultimately, we bring ourselves into the world’. One key educational responsibility is to provide opportunities for learners to engage with their learning ‘in such a way that they can bring themselves into the world’ – they should, in other words, be able and allowed to respond, in their own unique ways, and those responses should matter, both to educators and to institutions. Something important is being lost in the shift away from the language of education, towards a language of learning. Educators, Biesta suggests, should become ‘bilingual’, proficient in both languages, ever conscious that there is more to education than learning.

Ian Martin has argued forcibly in these pages that sustaining the links between adult education and big ideas such as democracy, justice and equality requires that we look beyond the ‘learning paradigm’. Where should we look for a new paradigm? Linden West suggests that we turn to adult education’s historic roots, to its concern to build spaces ‘for dialogue, for conviviality and mutuality, for support and nurture, and for learning from difference’. As John Field asks elsewhere in this issue, ‘if adult learning does not include learning for and through citizenship, then what is it for?’ With an estimated million adults lost to learning over the past two years in the UK, the question is timely.

 Paul Stanistreet, Editor, Adults Learning