Origins Of A Mistake

We saw in the previous chapter some of the contradictions that emerge when an account of lifelong learning is promoted which pays undue attention to economic considerations and suggests that these are causally linked to formal learning. We conclude this present chapter with a broadly Foucauldian account of how a belief in such causation leads to a panopticon society, within which people have reason to believe that they are controlled increasingly through formal learning. To reach this conclusion we examine the metaphysical and epistemological bases which support current polices towards lifelong learning and we attempt to situate such policies in wider societal concerns. These concerns include the tension between, on the one hand, fitting learners into society so that they may contribute to the proper functioning of that society including its economic functions – encultur-ation. On the other hand there is the desire to enable learners to decide for themselves the societal parts they want to play – individuation. It is hard to see how this latter desire could be met unless learners were formally initiated, at least to some extent, into some of the options available to them.

We do not want to argue that all formal learning is bad, nor that economic considerations are irrelevant to learning. Ours is not a nostalgic thesis in which we hanker for an imaginary past where children went to school for the love of learning alone, taught by progressive educators concerned only with some romantic notion of intrinsic goodness or student interest. For us, just as it is mistaken now to overemphasise the instrumental aims of formal learning, so it was also a mistake to attempt to formalise the informal through schemes of progressive education, as if there could be exclusive access to some notion of an intrinsic good. We are con tent to accept a balance between formal and informal learning as between instrumental and intrinsic values.