ABSTRACT
In a powerfully influential book, Eric Fromm (1979) argued that a fundamental block to effective study was the notion that students could ‘have’ knowledge. You may well think this way yourself as books, notes, essays and assignments become possessions that mean a great deal to you. Handing over a dissertation for marking can sometimes feel like giving away your own child, so strong is the attachment. Yet knowledge or learning, whatever you take them to be, are unlikely to be ‘things’ that we ‘have’. Fromm saw them more as signs of our understanding at a particular moment. His ideas went much further than discussing study and his book To Have or To Be? is still relevant today. I have drawn freely on some of his ideas and related them to study.
