IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

136 Chapter 7
have less of it. But as Illich soon discovered, that’s a hard approach to sell.
Governments everywhere are convinced that in an age of accelerating
change and increased technological complexity, the skill at learning of its
people will distinguish one country from another. Education is universally
perceived to be key to national competitiveness. Governments everywhere
are looking for ways to give us more of it and to make it better. 2
The febrile attention paid to education has spawned a boom in learning
research. The world is awash in books, think tank reports, learning laboratories,
institutes, and websites (and this chapter). Tens of thousands of intelligent
people are learning about learning. At the Amsterdam University
of Professional Education, research director Caroline Nevejan showed me
a three-hundred-page document she had been given, written in execrable
learning-speak, that evaluated no fewer than thirty different teaching
methods and instruments. These ranged from ‘‘critical incidents method’’
to e-mail discussion lists, search engines, and ‘‘self-reflection instruments.’’
(I decided at the time that the last of these must have been a mirror.) 3
Another university researcher I met had been asked to review the state of
thinking on just one learning issue—assessment—and had to read ten
years’ issues of 160 different specialist journals to get up to speed. 4
There may be too much of it, but this mountain of research has nonetheless
delivered important insights. A consensus has emerged that learning is
about the acquisition of new skills, including social ones—not just about
the stockpiling of facts. People possess multiple intelligences, not just the
formal ones measured by the intelligence tests and school exams that
plagued me as a child. Social, physical, and emotional intelligences are important,
too, we now know: We need to develop a combination of factual,
process, and cultural knowledge to manage well in today’s complex world.
According to David Hargreaves, professor of education at Cambridge University,
we need cognitive-intellectual skills, aesthetic-artistic ones, affective-emotional
abilities, physical-manual skills, and personal-social skills. 5
For another eminent professor, Howard Gardner, professor of cognition
and education at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, the
most important skills of all are so-called metacognitive skills—an understanding
of guiding principles, of what really matters, and the ability to
filter out the growing flood of stuff that does not. ‘‘We need to be able
to formulate new questions,’’ Gardner argues (writing with coauthor
T. Hatch), ‘‘and not just rely on tasks or problems posed by others. We
need the ability to learn in new ways, to evaluate our own progress, to