“If we can walk and chew gum at the same time, then we can value both teaching and learning and we can treat both—and their relations—as worthy objects of research.”
Peter Goodyear, 2021

Public education philosopher Gert Biesta has argued that the language of “learning” is a bland and insidious vocabulary which diminishes the purposes of education. In learnification discourse, “learners” (not students) are placed at the centre of the learning process and cast as individualised consumers engaged in a transaction, taking the lead on defining their educational needs and engaging with those providers who will meet them – despite being in the paradoxical situation of not having learned what it is they need until after they have asked for it. Biesta points out that putting learners at the centre of education means decentralising teachers, who are then relegated to the nebulous role of facilitating “learning” as defined and directed by “learners” themselves.

Characterised as such, it is easy to concur that “learning” sounds like a rudderless task. It is an empty process word, the meaning of which seems to slip through the fingers of the mind as they grasp for it. Learning – but what for? Learning – but how, without the wise guidance of teachers? The word seems to become quite literally pointless without education and teachers pointing it in purposeful directions.

Etymology, metaphor, and power

If I trace learning words back to their likely Proto-Indo-European roots (with thanks to the wonderful Online Etymology Dictionary), I find that the words have evolved from origins that chime with Biesta’s conception.

Learn derives from lois- meaning “furrow or track”, while educate has the root deuk- which means “to lead”. Similarly teach comes from a PIE root deik- meaning “to show or point out”. If we imagine these origins for a moment as metaphors, they suggest that learning is a path, while education represents direction along it. Study has a more kinetic root: (s)teu-, which had the sense of “to push, knock or beat”, suggesting the application of force in navigating the path.

(Bonus for those in professional and technical education: train has not been traced back to PIE, but seems to come from the Latin trahere, “to pull”.)

There are two vital dynamics to consider here; one which is implicit in the etymological metaphor, and one which isn’t. The first is power relations between the educator and the learner. One has assumed the right to set the direction of the other. The second dynamic is the contemporary presence of money in educational relationships, which in turn impacts the distribution of power. Education costs money – and the entity who pays largely gets to calibrate the compass. This is not a recent effect of “learnification” and market-driven education, as Biesta suggests. When the funder is the state, the state defines the curriculum in line with its own goals for educational output. When industry foots the bill, it demands a direction that will produce productive workers of the type needed to propel industry. And when learners (or their families) pay directly for education, they assume the right to set the course. And today, who funds education? The reality is that education’s funding is drawn directly and indirectly from all of these sources and more. Education is a political project, and a profoundly conflicted one.

As I mentioned, power dynamics are codified within the roles of teachers and students, with teachers positioned as sites of expertise and mature reasoning in contrast to the formation-in-progress of students. But as Biesta notes, in “learner-centred” discourse, teachers become “guides on the side” to learners who are the chief navigators of their own learning. This represents an existential demotion for a profession which traditionally sees itself as a form of leadership. Of course, the concept of teaching-as-leadership is an ideal that has long been divorced from reality.

Across sectors, teaching is in crisis – and I don’t believe this has much to do with putting learners at the centre. Teachers across sectors are being buried under leagues of bureaucracy as education systems are increasingly subject to managerial regimes. Globalisation and competition have led to a supreme focus on rigid curricula, standardised testing and outcomes. Teacher training programs are so overstuffed with rules and requirements that the relational work of guiding learning is almost an addendum. Today’s social, technological and economic climates are volatile, with what’s considered valid knowledge subject to rapid and graceless expiry.

And qualified, experienced teachers are leaving the profession in vast numbers due to appalling conditions – low pay, poor resourcing, deep inequities, psychologically unsafe environments, and astronomical workloads.

It is therefore difficult to trust in the direction of teachers, whose role in leading (or “pointing”) the way on the educational path is overwhelmingly choreographed by those who have commissioned the curriculum. It is not “the language of learning” that has done this; it is something much older and far more troublesome.

My encounters with education

Biesta proposes three “legitimate” purposes for education: qualification (the learning of knowledge and skills), socialisation (the induction of learners into their social worlds), and subjectification (learners’ development of agency within those worlds). I adore these purposes. To me, they elegantly express the complex role that education can play in developing learners as people in the world.

But although these principles propose an education that is meaningful, they are not – to me – what “education” means. When I reflect on my own formal schooling, I am overwhelmed by thoughts of control, conformity and codification. The students who did well are those who were best able to recognise and follow the rules of the institution: the rules of behaviour, the rules of academic performance, the rules of status. I was (mostly) able to follow the rules, but I knew I didn’t properly understand them; in reality I was mostly lucky that my own tendencies mirrored what the school demanded of me. I recall being sure that my high performance at school was not predictive of success in the world outside it, of which I was totally ignorant and where the rules were very different.

Everyone’s school experiences are different, of course. I can and will speak only for myself. I offer this perspective because I know I was one of the most privileged students, receiving high academic results and genuine teacher support across all my years of compulsory education; yet to me “education” has always seemed a mechanistic force for processing “students”.

Today, as a mature-age doctoral candidate with two decades of professional experience behind me, I still feel my identity and achievements in the world being diminished whenever I am treated as a “student”. The higher education system is designed to expect certain characteristics of a student: docility, deference, malleability, acceptance of power structures. Rather than being asked what I need, I am told what I’ll get. The institutional lack of flexibility is profoundly forbidding. I am required to do an enormous amount of affective work to manage the dissonance between my adult identity and my treatment as a student.

But I keep coming back to education. I have spent over 20 years of my life engaged in formal education: primary and secondary schooling, an undergraduate degree, two masters and now a doctorate. It seems strange to claim I don’t identify as a student – but I don’t. I have learned with many, many teachers. Some were utterly wonderful. Others were disappointing, discouraging, even threatening. Perhaps my refusal of “student” is in part a refusal to subjugate myself to whatever, whoever, is presented as my “leader” in learning. As a child I had no choice. As an adult, my learning is my own. I have come far on my path, and though sometimes I choose to walk with others, it is me who leads the way.