What Is Learning and Why Does It Matter?

bs_bs_banner

European Journal of Education, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2015

DOI: 10.1111/ejed.12105

What is Learning and Why Does It Matter?

Michael Young

Introduction

In a recent paper that I commented on (Young, 2014) David Scott (2014) argued

that all human learning was an ‘epistemic’ or ‘knowledge building’ activity and

inescapably social. There is no learning (and no knowledge) that does not in some

sense involve social relations. It is its sociality that distinguishes knowledge from

facts and information and distinguishes human from all animal learning and, of

course, from what is misleadingly referred to as ‘machine learning’. It is the failure

to recognise the distinctiveness of human learning and that it is not some generic

phenomenon that has trivialised much educational research and made one skeptical of the claims of the new field of the Learning Sciences. The idea that learning

can be treated as a generic phenomenon not dependent on what is learned has held

back research into the relationships between how and what people can learn in

different contexts.

Learning as a ‘Knowledge-Building’ Activity

The idea that learning is an ‘epistemic’ or ‘knowledge-building’ activity is crucial

for understanding how learning, always a differentiated activity, has historically

become increasingly specialised. Some important ‘knowledge-building’ takes place

through experience alone, as long as there are others to learn from. For example,

young children learn their ‘mother tongue’ from members of their families without

being explicitly taught. All work involves learning from experience, and in all

societies, some work is specialised, in the form of crafts and trades, and requires

specialised learning. However, it is still ‘learning from experience’. The major

historical change came when certain kinds of work required learning that could not

rely solely on experience or ‘learning on the job’.

The Limitations of Learning from Experience

The...