Thanks for this thoughtful reply, that prods me to go further.
The discussion here all still rather assumes that it is the education-machine that is getting in the way of learners learning, and not asking some even more basic questions.
By the ‘education-machine’ I meant “technology enhanced teaching, and… institutional goals” [using Adorno and Foucault to think of the school-as-institution with power/social/economic structures and intentions] which I understood you were putting in opposition to “individual” learners’ “aims or cognitive gains”. The concept of ‘technology-enhanced learning’ or ‘education’ was thus problematised as being institution-facing rather than focusing on, enabling or starting from the place of the student.
I think my question or discomfort was with the concept of ‘learning outcomes’ in the first place. With credentialism, and measuring knowledge or codifying it. I had some question about the concept of being a learner. I’m still trying to articulate this for myself because all my life has been committed to being either a learner or a teacher (and often both at once), so I’m trying to wrestle with a paradigm and an article of faith from the inside of it.
In order to start unpacking what I think about learning, I was trying to work out what I mean by the term. Is learning a thing that is done by the other person in a learning-teaching relationship? Is learning a thing we do whenever we gain more knowledge, information or skill? Is being learned a status you can acheive (like being a medieval clerke, or having a degree)? (I did this the first time round by thinking of antitheses, but I agree, that migth not be a useful way to go further.) Each of those ways of defining learning are problematic in their own way, and so I wondered if there might be another model that was less about power, status or data.
Hence wisdom. I think there can’t be ‘wisdom outcomes’–that’s the point of wisdom. It’s a process, and not necessarily a linear one. Sometimes small children, teenages, the elderly, or people who have pursued a religious path are deeply wise, and the next minute deeply unwise.
I am also not sure that there is always a use to wisdom, or an outcome from it. It’s hard to measure, and it’s not always clear who is wiser in any given situation. I’m not sure it can be taught, though I think it can be valued and fostered. And wisdom doesn’t always give answers to your questions, sometimes it says you are asking the wrong question altogether, or that you should wait for 10 years before asking the question again.
Perhaps that’s the major issue with machine-knowledge (the robots and AIs and data stores)–they can learn, they can know, they can teach; and often faster and more accurately than a human. But they don’t have wisdom, and that is why they have the potential to get it so wrong.
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