Learning to be a Person in Society

Peter Jarvis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136617171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Learning is a lifelong process and we are the result of our own learning. But how exactly do we learn to be a person through living? In this book, Peter Jarvis draws together all the aspects of becoming a person into the framework of learning. Considering the ongoing, "nature versus nurture" debate over how we become people, Jarvis's study of nurture - what learning is primarily about – builds on a detailed recognition of our genetic inheritance and evolutionary reality. It demonstrates the ways in which we become social human beings: internalising, accommodating and rejecting the culture to which we are exposed (both primarily and through electronic mediation) while growing and developing as human beings and people.

As learning theory moves away from traditional, single-discipline approaches it is possible to place the person at the centre of all thinking about learning, by emphasising a multi-disciplinary approach. This wide-ranging study draws on established research from a number of disciplines into the complexities that make us who we are. It will appeal to a wide variety of audiences: those involved in all fields of education, the study of learning and development, human resource development, psychology, theology and the caring professions.

Section II

Processes of learning

Chapter 7

Experiencing

In Chapter 5 we examined the concept of experience and looked at ways in which it relates to human living. But this is not just a concept – we have experiences, and experience, so we argue, is the start of learning, so that in this chapter we examine the idea of experiencing. In a sense the argument of this book is the opposite to Descartes. He argued that because I have experiences I know that I am (cogito ergo sum), whereas we argue that because we are we have experiences.

Experience is the way by which the sense organs transmit through our bodies to our minds images of the external world, which we will explore a little more in the following chapter: we are aware of what is external to us and we can have an experience of it. But it is worth making the point from the outset that we actually learn from our experiences of the external world and not from the external world itself – this is a point to which we will return in the next chapter on perception. We all have different forms of experience – in both space and time – and it is we who are affected by our experiences. The fact that we can discuss different forms of experience demonstrates that we can and do actually experience external reality in different ways, and so the following chapters illustrate something of these differences, but they may also relate to the different parts of the brain which process them (Gardner, 1983). All of these mental experiences start from the diverse processes of sense experiencing and perceiving, but, as Gardner points out, we experience different phenomena, such as music and mathematics, with different parts of our brains. In his theory of multiple intelligences, he suggests that we actually have different types of intelligences and that we do not know to what extent there is a general intelligence to which each of these other intelligences correlates. Hence, our experiencing starts with the senses – a biological basis of intelligence – but it does not end there for the biological combines with the cultural to provide a basis for intelligence. Our different experiences occur in time and space and they also affect our biographies. Consequently, this chapter has three parts – in time, in space and in ourselves – and we will show that, for the most part, a great deal of our learning in everyday life is socially and culturally reproductive. At the same time, reproduction does not imply any form of universality, since we live in different strata (e.g. socio-economic class) of society, learn different gender expectations in our social group, and so on. Although there is some universality in humankind, our cultural experiences are our own and are unique.

Part 1: In time

There are many ways of examining time, and if we were to write a philosophy of learning we would be bound to look at some of these, but for the purpose of this enquiry we will look briefly at five different aspects/responses to our experience of time: ageing, durée/disjuncture, ‘time flies’ (being busy), optimum experience, ‘time drags’ (boredom), and the slow movement and attentive experience.

Ageing

We have started this enquiry with early childhood and have seen how the early years really do affect our future lives, but for many people there has been a belief that as we age we are less able to learn and even that it is almost impossible to learn new things. The old adage ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ is frequently cited.

Now we know that, as we age, so some of the millions and millions of neurons in the brain are destroyed or become dormant and some of the synaptic connections are severed if they are not used – ‘use it or lose it’ as the saying goes. But, as we have seen here, learning is not entirely biological but is also experiential, and we continue to have experiences for as long as we stay involved in the world. Naturally, some of our potential experiences are curtailed if we do not have the physical abilities or acuities to take advantage of the possibilities, but this does not mean that we cannot learn within our physical limitations.

Indeed, the story of Gail Sheehy’s (1995) New Passages is that through every age in life we can continue to learn and to live life to the full for as long as we remain engaged in the world of relationships and activities, although our dominant emotions do change with the ageing process (Erikson, 1965: 239–66). Manheimer (1999), for instance, records how he taught philosophy classes to the very old and so it is – until we decide to disengage we can continue to learn. Havighurst (1970) suggested that the last two stages of life are deciding when to disengage and disengagement itself: indeed, it is only in death that we are entirely alone. Until that time, we can continue to learn and to play an active role in the world (see Jarvis, 2001).

From before birth to death we can keep on having experiences from which we learn and add new memories, interpretation and meanings to our lives. We will return to this at the end of the book – but the story of learning to be a person in society is the story of being and becoming a person through all the ages of life.

Duration/disjuncture

Time, says Bergson (see Lacey, 1989: 26–32), is like a melody: we are not aware of the individual notes. Or we live in harmony with our life-world and the world is unproblematic. Lacey (ibid.: 29) describes Bergson’s conception of duration thus: ‘duration implies consciousness’, its ‘essence is to flow without ceasing, and consequently not to exist except for a consciousness and a memory’. However, the very ceaseless flow makes the experience almost unconscious – that is, that we are not conscious of the passing of time, only of the world upon which we can presume and act. There is a taken-for-grantedness about this form of harmony but less awareness than there is in Csikszentmihalyi’s optimal experience (see below), when we are fully aware of our situation. But when discord occurs in either duration or optimal situations, we can become aware that we are not in harmony – we are faced with a situation that we cannot take for granted and we have to stop and think and learn. It is this that I have called disjuncture and which we discussed earlier in this book. We have a conscious experience when we are aware that we do not know, although the degree of consciousness varies, as we showed in Figure 2.3. Now we are conscious of the situation and may not be conscious of time at all – except that it is the present ‘now’. This is the awareness of a specific moment in time when we become conscious of our situation and we experience it.

Disjuncture does not automatically result in applying ourselves to a learning experience: it may be because we have been doing things rapidly because we have been too busy and so, when a disjunctural situation arises, it is just an additional burden – one that we do not want at that time and so we actually do not consider the situation and reject the opportunity to learn. There are others, such as when the potential learning will potentially affect our attitudes, disrupt our meaning about life, and so on, in ways that we do not wish – then we also reject the opportunity to learn. These I (Jarvis, 1987) have called non-learning. However, as we will see later in this chapter, although we may reject the content of the potential learning experience, we may well be affected as selves, and this may result in the occurrence of some unintentional and perhaps pre-conscious learning.

Optimal experience

In a very similar manner, Csikszentmihalyi (1990: 39) writes of optimal experience: ‘When the information that keeps coming into the awareness is congruent with goals’. He suggests that when this happens ‘psychic energy flows effortlessly’ (ibid.). This is the same sense of harmony that we mention in the above paragraph, but there is a greater sense of awareness than with duration – it is something that enables us to deal with the information almost unthinkingly because previous experiences have equipped us to respond to the new stimulus in a rapid way because we have trained ourselves to be aware of the situation. In this way, time appears to fly because every moment is filled with expectation. Csikszentmihalyi argues that people find greater satisfaction in this form of activity, and that this leads to happiness or contentment: in a real sense the experience has meaning because we have prepared ourselves (learned) in readiness for each new experience – we become absorbed in the activity that we are undertaking. Like the previous situation, when the unexpected occurs, we have a disjunctural experience, but we may be more ready and able to respond to it since we have prepared ourselves for the expected experience.

Although Csikszentmihalyi does not suggest this, his work is also a reflection of society’s demands for efficiency and speed: fast food, etc. Everything has to be done with optimum efficiency and, although this might lead to satisfaction, it is not the type of happiness that we get when we are having optimal experiences. In this world, we are just too busy to appreciate our experiences to the full and so we may learn less from them.

Boredom – time drags

Quite the opposite is the sense of boredom – this can be because we have nothing to do or because what we do is apparently meaningless to us – meaningless because we go through the motions of doing things but without being committed to the meaning that the social group gives to the actions, or because we actually have nothing meaningful to do. Everything seems to drag and, because we are so wrapped up in this meaningless experience, we may be unable or unready to have a new experience. In this sense, we actually miss the opportunity and, since time does not repeat itself, that specific opportunity has gone for ever, even though similar ones might arise at other times and we might be more able to respond to them.

Slowness and attentive experience

The world in which we live is a rapidly moving world, and the experiences we have may be partial or directed in one specific direction so that our perception is incomplete – or at least we get less from the experience than we might have done had we tackled it differently. Almost as a protest to the demands of rapidity and efficiency of contemporary society a movement seeking slowness has emerged. In fact, the slow movement has become a social movement in contemporary society (Honoré, 2004: 33–46): it aims at getting people to slow down and to appreciate their experiences more deeply. This movement has precisely the same type of concerns as Crawford (2005) captured in her discussion of attentiveness in her feminist interpretation of attentive love. However, I do not want to emphasise the gender base that she claims for attentive love (agape – see also Jarvis, 2008) since it is a characteristic that men can adopt as well; instead I will argue that disinterested love is the one sole good. Crawford (2005: 115) argues that the current conditions of Western culture militate against attentiveness. Slowing down, being attentive to persons and experiences, changes one’s perceptions of the world – it creates a more spiritual, caring, human approach. Slowness is using time to the best possible advantage so that we can plumb the depths of meaning in order to understand more fully the experiences that we have.

Part 2: Space

Like time, there are a number of facets of space, four of which will be explored briefly here: social position/group membership, environment, primary experience (interaction with people in our life-world in holistic experiences) and secondary experience (mediated content, including being taught).

Social position/group membership

As we live in a familiar life-world so our experiences will be restricted, in a sense, because our life-world itself provides parameters within which most of our life is lived. Thus, Schutz and Luckmann (1974:36–45) discuss fully the spatial arrangements of the life-world, distinguishing between the world within actual reach and that within potential reach. However, the significance of their discussion lies in the way in which they show how individual life-worlds overlap and yet remain individual: there is a sense in which we can presume on our life-world because it is familiar. In this sense, a great deal of our social living is socially and culturally repetitive and reproductive – we are interacting with others who share a great deal of our life-world. However, there is a potentiality to reach beyond the immediate, since a great deal of that is also familiar to us.

Consequently, we can see that there is a considerable propensity for us to live socially and culturally reproductive lives – to be conformists – this is in relation to all forms of subcultural activity including knowledge and the emotions. The potential for change comes when we can no longer take the world for granted: when there is a disjunctural situation. Then learning something new might, but does not necessarily, occur.

Environment

In the Delors Report (1996), four pillars of learning are mentioned: learning to know, to be, to do and to live together. From the outset I have always argued for a fifth pillar – learning to care for the environment. Because of the threats of global warming, we have become much more conscious of the significance of caring for the planet, and O’Sullivan (1999) argues that global capitalism is destructive to both the earth and humanity and that we need to develop a new vision of creation and all within it. In this a major factor is the earth, which needs to be cared for in a way that humankind has not done. In the past decade the concerns of global warming are being brought home to us, and the more that we experience this, the more we learn about what is occurring. In my own experience, I recall that in the early 1990s I visited an area in Alaska not far from Anchorage and stood beside icebergs in July, but only a decade later I revisited the same area in May and there were no icebergs – they had all melted. The experience of the changed planet made me more aware than ever of the need to be concerned about the earth – we experience the external world and its conditions and we learn from our experiences of the environment. I had a primary experience of the changing environment.

Primary experience

Primary experience corresponds to the world within our reach:

The world in my actual reach contains, apart from this sector’s orientation to proximity and distance, which is centred on me, and arrangement according to the modalities of meaning. Through this the Objects of this sector are given to me. This arrangement in visual range, in auditory range, indeed in the field of reach, is certainly overlaid by the identity (which is taken for granted in the natural attitude) of things as seen, heard, etc.

(Schutz and Luckmann, 1974: 37)

Here then we see the taken-for-granted of daily living but, as we have just seen, primary experience need not be taken for granted and habitual – it can be disjunctural. However, Schutz and Luckmann (1974) also discuss the world of potential reach; that is, when we move our location, there are worlds beyond our primary experience that can become primary but, although we may be familiar with these worlds, there is a greater likelihood of disjunctural experiences when we are in a new situation. They regard the zone in which we are likely to have primary experiences as the zone of operation and they recognise that there is a world beyond this that we experience differently.

Secondary experience

These might also be called mediated experiences since they are experiences we have of different times and places although we are not actually present in the situation: they can be provided through discussions in personal interaction, or by media, wireless and electronic communication. Whereas some secondary experiences are interactive, the majority of them are more impersonal: people are exposed to hours of television and wireless broadcasting everyday and to the advertising on the web and so on (see Jarvis, 2008). We are recipients of information and, as the amount grows, there is a tendency to scan it rapidly, as discussed above, and to spend less time considering the content of the communication. Nevertheless, much of this communication has effects on our lives and, as I have argued (Jarvis, 2008), the creation of desire occurs through advertising, as the advertisers endeavour to generate in everybody, but especially young children, the desire to purchase, to have, to own, to consume, and so on. Nevertheless, advertising, in its educative form, can actually form a more legitimate purpose, which is to inform, although it is usually used with an ‘educational’ purpose. As recipients of secondary experiences, we learn a lot, but we can also be manipulated or indoctrinated to perform the actions that those who transmit the information wish because we do not spend time analysing the information that we receive. But not all secondary experiences are of this nature.

Learning by being taught

All teaching, except where a practical element is introduced, is a combination of secondary experiences in the content of what is taught and the primary experience of being present in the classroom with the teacher and other students, or even of the students operating their computers or other electronic devices. However, the more rational the presentation, the less likelihood that it will result in in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Section I Laying the foundations
• Section II Processes of learning
• Section III Being and becoming
• References
• Index