I love posts like the one I am citing (see below). There are plenty of people talking about education reform , people who come at this from the theater of politics, big business, the education industry, and even a few of the hoi polloi (like me…). This post, as with my own thoughts wonder if it is possible to change or fix anything without reevaluating some of the principles.

For instance, what is it to know something? What exactly is learning?

With this stated, some of the more technical terms and ideas which the blog post author references seem to me to ring out like any master’s thesis (jargon above all is the motto, at least in the education biz).

The idea of productive and non productive learning seems to me to be focusing on the end of the argument (or discussion) rather than the beginning. I think that all of these sorts of issues add more noise to the signal (when the audience is considered).

By this I wonder if there is that much value is describing scenarios where learning becomes problematic …only as a lever to advance other agendas about education (school) reform.

Perhaps we should consider some related ideas first, such as:

How are the ways in which people do learn things?

Which are the things that should be learned?

How effectively do schools fit into these thoughts?

While the specifics of what the society needs for the education of its citizens have been used as a predicate for public education, have the needs of a society been trumped by individual needs with regard to what is learned?

Is there some sort of a market driven aspect to what and how we learn things (i.e. our own personal needs approximate the aggregate needs well enough, and have for quite a while…)?

There are plenty of other questions related to this blog post; I suggest you take the time to read it!

And What Do YOU Mean by Learning?
http://weblogg-ed.com/2011/and-what-do-you-mean-by-learning

A couple of weeks ago, on the recommendation of Gary Stager, I picked up Seymour Sarason’s 2004 book And What Do YOU Mean by Learning? And I’ve been slowly working my way through it. It’s not the easiest read, for me at least, but what keeps me diving in is the push he makes about what we define as learning, something that has been making me increasingly frustrated of late in terms of the national conversation around schools. Here are Sarason’s two main points for the book

First, we’ll never get true “reform” in schools until we come to some consensus on a more accurate definition of learning.

Second, that “productive learning” as he defines it doesn’t happen much at all in schools.

Here is a snip from the introduction that gives the flavor of both the style and the thesis:

Learning is not a thing, it is a process…I try on these pages to distinguish between contexts of productive and unproductive learning. And by productive, I mean that the learning process is one that engenders and reinforces wanting to learn more. Absent wanting to learn, the learning context is unproductive or counterproductive. Is it not noteworthy that the word or concept of learning probably has the highest of all word counts in the diverse literature in education and yet when people are asked what they mean by learning they are taken aback, stammer or stutter, and come up with a sentence or two which they admit is vague and unsatisfactory?

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