Opportunity And Contingency

In the Introduction we described ourselves as working within a liberal humanist theoretical framework. A commonly accepted feature of such a framework is that it is based on a separation of public and private spheres. Put simply people may do as they like in private so long as they do no harm to others. The existence of a public sphere is commonly supposed to enable objective decision making through the temporary suspension of private interests in favour of some notion of a common good. As we illustrated in the previous chapter an imbalance towards formal learning within lifelong learning leads to increasing invasion of what was previously considered to be private by the ‘system world’ (Habermas 1987). We concluded that chapter with an outline of what lifelong learning is likely to become if that imbalance continues and if the epistemological and metaphysical assumptions upon which the imbalance is based remain unchallenged.

In this chapter we argue that the notions of public and private are nothing like so clear as might be imagined. Nor, therefore, is it clear precisely how a balance in learning could be shifted from what might be imagined as the public formal sphere to the informal private sphere. While there is an essential contingency involved in the determination of opportunities for informal learning, we argue that such opportunities can be grasped with increasing degrees of sophistication by good informal learners. Good informal learners not only know how to learn but also what to learn. Indeed we see method as subservient to content. Learning how to learn is not best conceived as a technique to be applied, but as an appropriate selection of what to learn in a context that will enable future learning of what is presumed worthwhile. On this view the problem of curriculum, which has troubled formal curriculum designers, is equally applicable to informal learning. Moreover what is learnt formally is affected by what is learnt informally and vice versa.