Cultural Considerations

What counts as "learning" for educational purposes depends on cultural, social, economic and political factors, because implicit in education as a deliberate enterprise is the notion of prescription. Education is supposed to be a Good Thing. So having a phobia about worms is learned behavior, but it does not count as Education. Nor does acquiring greater skill in breaking into cars as a result of learning from peers in prison.

The process starts with what the society considers to be desirable knowledge, and indeed what counts as knowledge at all: consider the ambivalence about astrology, or complementary medicine. The social structure is also reflected in the attitude to the knowledge — is it unquestioned truth, to be learned and reproduced but not modified, or is it provisional knowledge on which critical faculties can be trained? (As one sociologist said, "Newton stood on the shoulders of those who went before: sociologists stand on their heads!") This leads into culturally endorsed models of the learning process, and variable acceptance of the initiative of the learner — as seen in constructivism or andragogy.

The subject matter, framed by culture, imposes its own discipline: it may be linear (like math, in which you have to learn the concept of number, counting, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, in that order, before you can go on to anything else) or accessible at any point. It may be governed by a clear philosophical structure (like science), or by its history (like law), or none of these. It may be convergent or divergent. See inter al. Kolb on this.

The society produces an educational system in its image, whether it makes use of informal — “situated” learning — or is seduced (as Illich would see it) by the Western model of dedicated educational institutions, whose inadequacies have been so clearly discussed in Becker’s wonderful essay.

Critical Approaches to Education