Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Human Learning

Peter Jarvis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781134254835
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

As interest grows in theories of lifelong learning not only across society but also as an area of serious academic study, the need has arisen for a thorough and critical study of the phenomenon. This distillation of the work of renowned writer Peter Jarvis addresses this need, looking at the processes involved in human learning from birth to old age and moving the field on from previous unsystematic and mainly psychological studies. Instead, Jarvis argues that learning is existential, and so its study must be complex and interdisciplinary.

The result is a giant step towards building a complete and integrated theory of how humans learn, taking account of existing theories to see if they can be reconciled with a more complex model. Applying his expert analytical approach to this wide-ranging topic, Jarvis looks in detail at:

• learning in the social context
• the transformation of experience
• the outcomes of learning
• learning and action
• cognitive theories
• emotions and learning
• experiential learning.

Part I Human learning

Chapter 1 A philosophical perspective on human learning

DOI: 10.4324/9780203001677-2

Learning is like food, ingest it and it will enrich the human being: unlike food, it is difficult to have too much. It is possible to eat the wrong things and it is likewise possible to learn the wrong things; Dewey (1938), for instance, used the term ‘miseducation’ to describe this. Nevertheless, the processes of learning are a fundamental stimulus for life itself and without it the human body could never transcend its biological state, nor could the individual function effectively in the wider society. It is essential to our humanity and, in fact, it is an existential process. This does not mean that studies of learning need only to be philosophical, but it does demand that we recognise the philosophical underpinnings of all theories of learning, in whatever academic discipline they are based. Moreover, since learning is a human phenomenon, it might be asked whether all the theories of learning are only aspects of the same human process. Consequently, it is necessary here to understand some of the basic philosophical arguments, especially the tenets of existentialism, that are important to our thinking about learning and the first part of this book will briefly explore these.

At the same time, this work is the culmination of over twenty years of thinking about and researching human learning. In that time I have published many books and papers about these human processes, a number of which have elaborated ideas that were previously published, and while it is unnecessary to review all of these here, it is important to demonstrate how my understanding has grown and developed and even to point out where I think I have made mistakes in the past, and so the second part of this chapter will offer a very brief overview of these develoments. My brief critique of my own work will in part be based on the philosophical ideas that I discuss in this book. This discussion is important since I am going to examine other theories of learning in the second part of this volume and demonstrate how all of these are attempts to understand the same human process which we call human learning, and which is located within the wider context of human society. Overall, this book is a quest to understand human learning a little better.

I will, therefore, then present my own current definition and models of learning and discuss them briefly and show that learning is a very complex human and lifelong process. This means that we should not seek to regard children’s learning, for example, as necessarily different from adult learning-even though there may be different processes and it occurs in different social contexts. But this does not mean that animal learning can be equated with human learning, although the two can be compared and contrasted. This also points us to the fact that the study of learning is interdisciplinary although there might, indeed should, be different emphases in specific studies.

Underlying this study is a fundamental belief that human learning is a complex set of human processes that are in some ways extremely difficult to understand. I have used the term ‘human learning’ here because some scholars, notably some of those from an organisational learning background, want to use the term to refer to change and development in organisations and even to society. We will look at ‘learning organisations’ in the second volume of this study. However, I will argue that this is a false understanding of learning, or at the very least a de-personalised concept of a human process, although there are considerable similarities between aspects of human learning and organisational change, since both have outcome, function, development and process. There is, however, is one fundamental difference: learning is about experience, usually conscious experience. Organisations may have a life of their own but they do not have experiences and so, for instance, their learning cannot begin from seeing a green apple fall to the ground! It takes a member of the organisation to have that experience and then to implement whatever learning that has occurred into the organisation’s procedures and structures in order to change them, thereby changing other people, their social context and their actions. To use learning to describe organisational processes is to try to de-humanise something that lies at the heart of humanity itself, of personhood, and while it may reflect the tenor of this age, using the term in this way deprives learning of something fundamental to itself.

Heidegger makes the significant point that the human being must be understood as person and that ‘Persona means the actor’s mask through which his dramatic tale is sounded. Since man is the percipient who perceives what is, we can think of him as persona, the mask, of Being’ (1968: 62). Learning, then, is a essential element of Being. Learning, it is maintained here, lies at the heart of our humanity – it is a driving force in human existence – so that our theories of learning must embrace an holistic and existentialist perspective.

Additionally, it is surmised here that researchers from different academic disciplines have unintentionally done the study of learning something of a disservice when they have failed to achnowledge that their single-discipline approach is but one of a number of different ways of understanding it.

Some relevant tenets of existentialism

This is not a study of existentialism (see Macquarrie 1973; Cooper 1990; inter alia) since this would entail an examination of many of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, which is not only beyond the scope of this work, it is beyond my ability. However, Cooper (1990: 2–3) makes the point that there are two main bases of existentialist thought: ‘existence’ refers to the kind of existence enjoyed by human beings and it also refers to a form of existence which distinguishes it from all others. This leads us to recognise that existence always precedes essence. In a sense, existence is the process of realising what we might become – being is always becoming: human becoming is achieved both through our learning and our physical maturing, so that we will need to explore the mind-body relationship in the next chapter. However, it is also important in passing to note that we cannot escape from the concepts of space and time in our thinking about learning – both past time and future time – for we learn by reflecting upon the past and also from planning for future activities, and we also do so within a social context. We shall return to these on a number of occasions.

Existence is, therefore, assumed and never needs to be proven. This means that the Cartesian dictum ‘I think, therefore I am’ is unnecessary – but this does not automatically exclude some form of dualist argments about the relationship between the mind and the body. I am! But what does existence actually mean? I know I am, and I do not need to prove it to myself. Because I am, I think. Macquarrie (1973: 125) writes:

But what does it mean to say, ‘I am’? ‘I am’ is the same as ‘I exist’; but ‘I exist’, in turn, is equivalent to ‘I-am-in-the-world’, or again ‘I-am-with-others’. So the premise of the argument is not anything so abstract as ‘I think’ or even ‘I am’ if it is understood in some isolated sense. The premise is the immediately rich and complex reality, ‘I-am-with-others-in the world’.

But Bergson (1998 [1911]: 7) makes another vitally important point:

for a conscious being to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

Existence, then, is never unchanging and always social; we live and move and have our being in a social context. We will argue throughout this volume that learning is the driving force of human change through which the human essence emerges and is nurtured. But also ‘I-am-in-the-world’ and ‘I-am-with-others’ are different phenomena: in the former we are in the wider world, but the latter can refer to our life-world (see Luckmann 1983; Habermas 1987; Williamson 1998). Habermas (1987: 118) made an important distinction between the social system and life-world and he proposed that we need to conceptualise society as being both simultaneously. But we know that we are in the world because we act, as MacMurray argued, ‘We know existence by participating in existence’ (1979 [1961]: 17), or as Husserl said, ‘I live in my Acts’ (cited in Schutz 1967: 51). I am, therefore I act, but also I act, therefore I am. But action is rarely meaningless, so that underlying action lies intention and meaning but, paradoxically, we have to learn meaning. Being, and therefore becoming, lie at the heart of our thinking about learning, but – and we need to emphasise this from the outset – thinking per se is but one element in it. Thinking is a function of our existence and not the proof of it. Because we are, we both think and act and by so doing we learn and, therefore, continue to become. Learning is the process of being in the world. At the heart of all learning is not merely what is learned, but what the learner is becoming (learning) as a result of doing and thinking – and feeling. Indeed, the mind really is not like a computer just performing functions, as it does experience the outcomes of sensations and we shall discuss this further below and in the following chapters. While it is conceptually mistaken to liken the mind to a computer, the computer may have some similarities to our brain. But as human beings we are much more than these computational functions. We do have experiences, feel and have emotions. And we do learn from and through our feelings. At the heart of this process, therefore, is the learner as a whole person and, therefore, the learner’s self. But self is formed through existing and interacting with people. We actually learn to become a person and this occurs within our own life-world; it is a social process (see Mead in Strauss 1964; Schutz 1967). Indeed, the demands of our life-world also determine to a great extent the opportunities that we have to learn.

Learning, then, is a much more profound phenomenon than just teaching dogs to salivate or rats to explore the mystery of a maze in search of food; it is fundamental to our humanity and to our society. It is about the way that human beings are in the world and the world in them – it occurs at the intersection of humanity and society – it is more than experiential, more than physiological, psychological and so on. Understanding it more fully is a momentous integrated multi-disciplinary project. Illeris (2002: 43) also captures something of the significance of human learning when he writes:

The human ability to learn developed together with other characteristics of our species in the struggle for survival of the various species, and this can be understood as one of several tools for the continued struggle.

Our action is always in the world, always engagement with the world (both the physical and the human social world) that we experience and these experiences become data for our own thinking, so that the idea of experiential learning points us in the direction of philosophy, amongst other things, and it is what we ‘do’ with our experience that lies at the heart of our understanding of learning. Our experience occurs at the intersection of the inner self and the outer world and so learning always occurs at this point of interaction, usually when the two are in some tension, even dissonance, which I have always called ‘disjuncture’. In fact, the desire to overcome this sense of dissonance and to return to a state of harmony might be seen as a fundamental motivating force in learning, and the disjunctural state may be said to be one in which a need has to be satisfied.

Cooper (1990: 79–94) highlights four perennial problems that are resolved through existentialist thought: subjects versus objects; mind versus body; reason versus passion; fact versus value. In the first instance, we do not stand over against the world, as a subject to an object, but we are in the world and it is ‘impregnated with human purposes and concerns’ (Cooper 1990: 80), but we are also partly the outcome of our interaction with the world. This is a dialectical relationship in which we also need an awareness to be able to respond to what we perceive to be the needs of the world. Second, the mind is embedded within the neurological mechanism of the brain and cannot either be separated from it nor confused with it; indeed, we cannot separate a self from its body nor a living body from its self. We are both physical and mental entities. Hence, when I do something it is not a mindless activity, but neither is it two activities – thinking and doing – but it is one human phenomenon since I am my body (Marcel 1976: 12, cited by Cooper 1990: 83) as well as my mind. Nevertheless, we will argue that my meanings and the bodily sensations that contribute to them are not synonymous, so that there is some form of dualism that we have to consider; something to which we will return below and more so in the next chapter when we explore it in greater depth, and later in the book when we discuss theory and practice, amongst other things. At the same time, a claim is being made here that all statements about mental states cannot be reduced to statements about physiological conditions without loss of meaning. Third, when we think something, we have emotions about it but, by contrast, when we desire something we are likely to think about it, even rationally plan how it can be obtained and so on. We are rarely such ‘cold fishes’ that our thinking is not in some way infused with our emotions about what we are thinking, but ‘emotion has to be subjected to reflection’ (Macquarrie 1973: 155) in existentialist thought, Indeed, even when we are committed to the rationalist answers to our own questions, we invest some emotion in the state of being committed to our answer. This is a very important point when we consider the processes of human learning. There is a sense in which emotion is a simultaneous combination of physical experiences and thought, but ultimately it is not merely physical. Finally, we exist in the world, a world which is impregnated with human purposes and concerns, and in some other ways we mirror our world, so that facts can only have value when they have meaning and objects only have meaning when we are aware and conscious of them. The resolution of these dualisms is crucial to our understanding human learning.

It is partially upon these premises that I have criticised my own work, and in the following section I want to review and criticise something of the process whereby my own ideas of learning have been changed and have developed.

Learning about human learning

During the mid-1980s I became profoundly dissatisfied with the many different approaches to learning, many of which were psychological and based on work with animals or children and, as an adult educator, I felt that these neglected major elements in our humanity. Additionally, I was unable to accept the traditional view of theory being le...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• The author
• Preface and acknowledgements
• PART 1 Human learning
• 1 A philosophical perspective on human learning
• 2 It is the person who learns
• 3 Learning in the social context
• 4 Experience – from which we learn
• 5 The transformation of experience
• 6 The person Changing and becoming more experienced
• 7 Lifelong learning
• PART 2 Towards a comprehensive theory
• 8 Learning and action
• 9 Cognitive theories
• 10 Emotions and learning
• 11 Experiential learning
• 12 Towards a comprehensive theory of human learning?
• Notes
• References
• Index