LearningApartFromInstitutions

Learning is a gift.

Institutions make many dimensions of learning possible, but impede many others -- and to the extent that they constitute learning as a reducible economic transaction, serving a variety of purposes with only an instrumental interest in learning, the goods of institutional learning are immured, obscured, and alloyed with practices and discourses that attenuate the value of those goods.

Convener(s): AKMAdam <http://akma.disseminary.org>;

Participants: Chris, Michael, Gerry, Susan, Ashley, Cliff (I think) and Debbie at the very end.

Summary of discussion, key points, conclusions, actions:

We began talking about the contours of learning, the occasions and textures of learning, and how we can further learning. Home schooling and factory education provided two points of reference for our discussion. Institutional education produces many "benefits": the orderly array of student progress, the production of grades, the division of subject areas, the space for critical interaction with texts and ideas. But these effects come at a cost: they impede the deepest, truest learning that comes from self-motivated inquiry and reflection; they dilute the time and resources devoted to education by interposing inessential (or pernicious) interactions, such as the vast bureaucratic apparatus of record-keeping, of certification and accreditation; they reserve their goods to those who can pay significant sums for access to the institutional goods, who can relocate to obtain those goods in situ, and they engender learning under the carrot/stick prodding of the threat of failure (which signifies the "waste" of teh time and money devoted to a study -- no matter how much the student learned).

None of those characteristics derives from the nature of learning. One can learn quite well without leaving a paper trail of credits, grades, and certificates. One can learn without paying vast amounts, or moving to distant locations. One can learn on an ad hoc basis, without the obligation to complete a course or prove that one has acquired a certain quantum of knowledge, a particular full increment of learning.

From there, we entered discussion of AKMA's project, The Disseminary <http://disseminary.org>;, which aims to provide a venue for opening the goods that institutional education produces to participants without regard to the restrictions that typically constrain education. The group participants pressed hard on the extent to which the project entails having the institutional cake and eating it too; is this about reform from within? Is this a rhetoric of revolution worn by a tenured racial?

After wrestling with the topic, the group reached a richer shared understanding of the project's intent and of how it could be articulated better, how it could reach the attention that would gain it mindshare and traction for change.