ABSTRACT
In current debates on issues of learning and schooling, a rationalist and instrumental perspective on knowledge and skills dominates. The underlying assumption is that learning can be described in quantitative terms as a matter of individuals acquiring ‘more’ of some defined and clearly delimited body of knowledge or academic subject. Analogously, the development of cognitive skills is conceived in a rather unidimensional manner as the abstract training of the mind to master given intellectual techniques. The dominant metaphor implies that knowledge resides within the individual, and the point of schooling is to master the skills that make it possible for the learner to answer questions referring to the predefined body of knowledge, while, for instance, the ability to formulate interesting questions has seldom been a prominent goal of schooling.
