Learning and Knowing

[James Kerr]

Our perception of our life-world is as taken-for-granted perspectives. Things that we know, we take for granted; we become complacent armed with our “reservoir of interpretation patterns” which are the concepts and labels we learn as children.

If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody around, does it make a sound? It makes sound waves, but what we consider the “sound of a tree falling in a forest” is a label we have applied to that particular set of sound waves when we interpret them. As a child learns colors, she does not inherently know the sky is blue or apples are red; we show her an apple that is red, and label it as such. The apple could as easily be green or yellow, but we’ve applied a label. Similarly, the sky could be identified when it is grey; does that mean when the sky is blue it is not the sky? Multiple labels for variables.

Contradiction occurs when perspectives are challenged; “The sky is not blue, it is purple.” Our
perspectives that we have learned and take for granted are questioned, and leads to either an affirmation (the sky IS blue) or a transformation (well I’ll be darned, it IS purple). Wildemeersch calls this the “threatened life-world” which brings about anxiety and parlyzation. Once the anxiety is overcome and the affirmation or transformation occurs, we are again content with our body of knowledge, our comfortable perspective. This is a pleasurable experience; one which we are driven to repeat throughout our lives. Brookfield, in Wildemeersch, states that a degree of critcial arousal is necessary for learning to occur; we must want to learn, and it must lead to a pleasurable experience, otherwise we would not be willing to undergo the anxieties of learning for the sake of learning.

The process of learning is the process of adding to our reservoir. We cannot know what has not been learned at some time in our lives. The earlier we learn something, the longer we stay comfortable with it in our life-world, and the harder it will be to challenge at later times in our lives.

Reference

Wildemeersch, D., & Leirman, W. (March 01, 1988). The Facilitation of the Life-World Transformation. Adult Education Quarterly, 39, 1, 19-30.

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