BAck to SkoOl

After a couple of decent lessons in the morning, off the college for my first PGCE session.

The first topic on the agenda was a look at 'education'. I wasn't too surprised that many fellow students seemed to pick up on the functional / process aspect as most are involved in 'life long learning' type teaching. I really felt the work I'd been doing as part of my degree on the subject of learning and knowledge management was useful - for me education is and has always been a social control mechanism used by organisations to ensure that people 'fit'. There's a real danger here in that approach as it acts as a boundary to knowledge and learning. Peter Senge suggests a possible defence in detaching emotion from thought and engaging in participatory discourse as a route to greater creativity and hence a culture of learning (Hatch 1997:369). This may be a bit too vague and academic for practical use (can you truly detach yourself emotionally?) .

I came across a term new to me - andragogy - which intrigued me. I dug out an article on the history of the term (Merriam 2001) and found it dated back to Michael Knowles in 1968. Knowles himself considers it to be model of assumptions about adult learners rather that a theory. Merriam (2001) questions whether it can truly be an 'adults only' term and I would concur, having taught young people and adults and having found many crossover experiences between the two. Ultimately it appears to revolve around self-directed learning - you can either cope with this or not and maybe it depends on your level of compliance with the education system. Fight, submit to or use? More control issues.

Hatch, M. J. (1997). Organization Theory: Modern Symbolic and Postmodern Perspectives. Oxford: OUP.
Merriam, S.B. (2001). "Androgagogy and Self-Directed Learning." In The New Update on Adult Learning Theory. New Directions for adult and continuing education, No. 89. S.B. Merriam, Ed. San Francisco, CA:Jossey-Bass, pp. 3-13.