New Significance of Learning

<p>Should education be understood mainly as a practice in its own right or is it essentially a subordinate affair to be shaped and controlled by a society’s powers-that-be?</p><p>What difference does it make if students are chiefly viewed as recipients of a set of skills and knowledge or as active participants in their own learning? </p><p>Does education have a responsibility in cultivating humanity’s maturity or are its purposes to be effectively matched to the functional requirements of a globalized age? </p><p><em>The New Significance of Learning</em> explores these and other high-stakes questions. It challenges hierarchical and custodial conceptions of education that have been inherited as the ‘natural order’ of things. It discloses a more original and imaginative understanding of educational practice illustrating this understanding with frequent practical examples. </p><p>Among the merits highlighted by this approach are: </p><ul> <li>a recognition that education is first and foremost an invitation to join a renewed experience of quest and disclosure;</li> <li>a realisation that taking up and pursuing such an invitation is a basic right as distinct from a privilege to be bestowed or withheld; </li> <li>an awareness of the decisive importance of specific kinds relationships in practices of teaching and learning;</li> <li>an emphasis on the human qualities as well as the intellectual achievements nourished by dedicated communities of learning;</li> <li>an acknowledgement of partiality – of incompleteness and bias – in even the best of humankind’s learning efforts;</li> <li>the emergence of a distinctive ethical orientation for education as a practice in its own right. </li> </ul>