‘Learning about learning’ – a conundrum and a possible resolution

Ronald Barnett

What is it to learn? The question has always been fraught with difficulty but perhaps it takes on particularly added degrees of difficulty in the modern age. One aspect of the concept of ‘learning’ is that, through one’s learning, one can go on better than before. One understands the world anew and so is better placed to negotiate one’s way through the world. But this aspect of learning is in jeopardy. For the modern age is replete with challenge, competing values and unpredictability. Consequently, it is by no means clear that learning, understood as a means to negotiate the world more effectively, holds the legitimacy it once held.

What, then, against this background, of the concept of learning? Can it still do work for us today? If tomorrow is not going to be like today, and if tomorrow is going to present us with incommensurable sets of concepts that challenge not just our actions but our identities, then the concept of learning can only be saved by some major surgery. The idea of learning as a means of securing better guides for negotiating the world has to be put in the dock if not repudiated altogether. It seems that it may not be possible to learn about the world in the earlier edifying form that ‘learning’ took. In turn, it follows that learning about learning is in double jeopardy.

I want to address this conundrum by following a course of reflecting on what it is to be – and to become - in a complex world. I shall introduce the three terms ‘hope’, ‘faith’ and ‘venture’. I shall return to such traditional – and even old-fashioned – ideas such as ‘understanding’ and ‘care’. I shall also want to draw on, and distinguish between, dispositions (such as ‘a will to learn’) and qualities (such a ‘fortitude’). And, en route, I shall critique (albeit only as a side commentary) the idea of learning outcomes. Crudely, I shall argue that it still makes sense to talk of learning in the contemporary world, but only if we broaden our sense of learning to include that of going on in a world in which there are no rules for going on.