Can we afford theories of learning?

Ray McDermott

pp. 403-415

in: Timothy Koschmann (ed), Theories of learning and studies of instructional practice, Berlin, Springer, 2011

Abstract

This book is built around three enlightened attempts to rephrase learning and instruction in ways more sensitive to the social organization of learning situations. This paper extends the effort by pointing at a growing scandal. Institutions of learning have been corrupted by the market. Learning has been measured, credentialed, bought, and sold to the point that educational reformers have to worry about the use and misuse of their most important product. They have to worry about the connections learning makes to persistent structural inequalities. Learning has been commodified, and efforts to reform learning instruction must be sensitive not just to the gentle facts of how it is best done by people working together, but to the more disturbing facts of how it can be isolated, tested, administered, fetishized, and put up for sale in the reproduction of career and income lines. Serious advances in learning theory must be protected from the possibility that they can be used to make things worse.