1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Whose business is this lifelong learning thing?, November 14, 2010
This review is from: Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order (Paperback)
Mention the term "lifelong learning" around educators and their hearts immediately begin to flutter and they utter lovesick sighs of approval. That's all to the good, except that when you probe underneath the abstraction offered by "lifetime learning," you often don't find much of substance. Field's book is a pleasant partial exception. Pleasant because he gives lots of good information about how various institutions are dealing with the imperative offered by the observation that the world is changing evermore rapidly. Knowledge work does indeed imply that we have to continue learning over our adult lifespan. Certainly some institutional support for lifelong learning is desireable. There is a fundamental problem, however, with the approach. Learning is a personal matter driven to a large degree by intrinsic motivation. Everything that institutions do to goad us into it is extrinsic. Field's book does not begin to do justice to what lifelong learning looks like from an individual perspective. Without a detailed model of what adult learning entails, there can be no effective conversation with the individual who is the lifelong learner. Without such a model, there is no meat to the discussion of what the learner must do to be an effective lifelong learner.
Let me offer an example. Merlin Donald in "Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition" writes at length about how the evolution of writing and other external means of representation have influenced the development of our cognitive capacities. He makes a strong case for saying that our external storage of ideas has a pronounced effect on the quality of our thought. What then are the artifacts that learners should create while they are learning that will support improved quality of thought later in their life? Students read textbooks, listen to lectures, take texts, create notes, and so on -- all of which use educational artifacts to create learning in the first place. There is no discussion, however, of what artifacts they should be creating to make the ideas have permanent value. Students sell their books back to the bookstore; I know of no one among my circle of educated friends who still has any notes from college; and my friends, like myself, have mostly forgotton the contents of the lectures. I haven't taken a test since leaving college. So what artifacts did we create as students that would give some teeth to the idea of lifelong learning being supported?
Give Field's points for his examination of the economic and institutional context of the "lifelong learning" discussion. Take away points for his failure to grapple with the learner's perspective, the place where the concept must live.
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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good overview of the subject, February 15, 2008
This review is from: Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order (Paperback)
A good overview of this subject. This is a British oriented book, but then this is a subject which is more focused upon in Europe than elsewhere.
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