ABSTRACT
I wish to begin this paper by citing a poem: 1 One day young captain Jonathan he was eighteen at the time Captured a Pelican On an island in the Far East. In the morning, This Pelican Of Jonathan's, Laid a white egg and out of it came A Pelican Astonishingly like the first. And this second Pelican laid in its turn A white egg, From which came inevitably Another who did the same again. This sort of thing can go on A very long time, if you don't make an omelette. The point of the poem is this: I interpret the proponents of the open education movement as seeing themselves in the omelette-making process with respect to the issues of socialization and social modelling. Put less metaphorically, the leading exponents and practitioners of open education maintain that they explicitly repudiate any involvement in socialization processes and reject the inhibiting and constraining use of any social models in the educative process. Individualism is to be free-flowering. In this paper, I will try to to show that this perception is an erroneous one, that the claim that open educators are not involved in socializing processes is false, that rather than creating omelettes, a mutated 'Pelican' is being substi-tuted for traditional social models. Moreover, I will try to show that there is 82an important theoretical dilemma which must be faced by open educators with respect to the issue of socialization. 2
