Abstract
In this chapter I consider a number of potential objections to Holt’s views on learning and education. In a change of mode, the chapter is not a continuous exposition. Instead, I first state an objection and then give a relatively self-contained essay in answer to it. The aim of these essays is not simply the negative work of rebuttal and refutation. Rather, through answering each objection, the chapter as a whole aims to enrich and extend the abstract framework provided in the previous chapter. In other words, this is a continuation of the previous chapter’s exposition of Holt’s views, but done in a somewhat more dialogical manner.
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Notes
- 1.
Elster’s assumption of hedonic adaptation is not essential to the point being made; the agent’s pleasure could flatten out, rather than declining back to zero.
- 2.
This degraded conception of agency is deeply embedded in contemporary ‘common-sense’. Alison Wolf, e.g., who is otherwise a fine debunker of many of the myths surrounding education, takes it for granted—asking her reader: “How much work do you do without either an immediate incentive or a deadline?” (2002, p. 289, n. 2), and clearly expecting the answer ‘not much’. The word doing the work in Wolf’s question is, of course, ‘work’.
- 3.
This point has not been well-understood in the literature on Socrates’s claim. It is missed entirely, e.g., in Mintz 2013.
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Dickerson, A. (2019). Objections and Replies. In: John Holt. SpringerBriefs in Education(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18726-2_3
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