How Much Unlearning Does Education Need?

• In Event: Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: Education and the Limits of Learning: How Much Learning Does Education Need?

Abstract

In most semesters, during the first class meeting I distribute erasers to everyone in the class and announce, “Our course will be more about unlearning than about learning.” This teaching move is inspired by Raymond Williams’ (1958) focus on “unlearning the inherent dominant mode” (p. 376), and Michel Foucault’s “désapprendre” (2005), a technology for fashioning oneself as a subject within a tangle of power relations. In one sense, the aim of distributing erasers is to disrupt the assumption that learning is the main purpose of education; in another sense, it calls attention to the behaviour and thinking patterns that we have inevitably learned just by participating in everyday social relationships.

Prior to the twentieth century, the term learn made sense only as a transitive verb: learn a language, learn good manners, learn calculus. However, Edward Thorndike’s (1931) work reconceptualised learning into an abstract faculty of transfer. The uptake of Thorndike’s reified notion has made it relatively easy for people these days to perceive learning as a neutral or desirable focus for education. It doesn’t matter any more what we learn; it matters that we learn. Learning has become a value unto itself; in the process, questions about the purpose of learning have been foreclosed.

Learning is not a bad thing, and some purposes of education are served well by learning. For example, most skills are learned through repetition. Socialization and qualification are, to a great extent, accomplished through learning. The problem comes when learning is assumed to have taken over the whole of education; learnification is a mindset in which education is reduced to learning to the exclusion of other possible values and purposes. Subjectification (in Biesta’s sense), for example, is generally not accommodated when learning dominates the idea of education, and the exclusion of subjectification (and other relational values) from a learnification model of education is the basis of many recent philosophical critiques.

Subjectification usually requires unlearning. To consider the possibilities of unlearning is to begin with the assumption of the tacit curriculum: we experience socially embedded relational lives in which we are always already learning. Unlearning begins with the assumption of power relations.

Other than subjectification, there are purposes of education that unlearning may serve. Creativity (in the artistic sense) relies on experimentation, willingness to fail, and divergent thinking, all of which become possible by unlearning previously established patterns of thought. Unlearning may spark curiosity. The cultivation of ethical dispositions may be facilitated by unlearning birth-family interaction patterns, cultural media messages, and received language structures. Capacities for empathy and intimacy may become possible by unlearning fear and shame.

Unlearning has the potential to help us escape from some of the ethical traps of learning, including individualism, value-free thinking, and pre-determined ends. In this paper, I am using the term unlearn partially as a rhetorical device for playful purposes. It is meant to prod at assumptions and jog imagination. I hope the thought of unlearning performs poetically to challenge previous limits of thought about what else education might be.

Author

• Lynn Fendler, Michigan State University