IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

e able to transfer knowledge from one context to another.’’ 6 The new
mantra is learning to learn: a range of skills—and the capacity to use them
effectively—that will equip us to understand abstract concepts and complex
systems and how to live among them and improve them. 7
The research army has also discovered that we learn in different ways:
when we listen to stories, when we do things with our hands, when we
ponder deep questions on our own, perhaps in the bath. We learn when
we participate in group projects in the real world. We learn when we make
music and do art. All this is uplifting stuff when I think back to the learnby-rote
Latin lessons I endured at school. Amo, amas, amat.
Earning from Learning
Learning 137
There is a mismatch between the kind of learning prescribed by these
enlightened experts and what many employers perceive to be their shortterm
needs. As a result of this mismatch, the school-to-work transition has
become an increasingly difficult phase, and many employers now take their
own direct training measures. These tend to be heavy on applied skills—
and light on metacognitive ones. 8 We might reject the narrow focus of
much corporate education, but it’s partly our own fault as a society. We
have filled the world with such unstable technology and clunky systems;
these need to be looked after by people with limited horizons who do
what they are told and don’t ask too many questions. Call centers—to
name just one among a thousand support functions in our technological
culture—don’t recruit people with metacognitive skills who look at the
bigger picture. They need drones.
The widening gap between what formal education provides and what
business thinks it needs has stimulated the emergence of learning as a market.
This market also benefits from the fact that governments are looking
for ways to educate more people to ever higher levels—but without spending
more money. They therefore encourage private-sector investment in
what is known in new-economy-speak as the ‘‘education space.’’
On paper, education, like health and care, is a vast market. Spending on
learning by all organizations in the United States amounts to some seven
hundred fifty billion dollars, or 7 percent of GDP. That’s half what the
country spends on health, but still a tidy sum. In France, Europe’s highest
spender on education, the number is closer to 25 percent. 9 Spending by all
organizations worldwide is estimated to be two thousand billion dollars.