ABSTRACT
E. D. Rosen has introduced the term "psychobabble" for the currently popular jargon picked up from encounter groups and the drug/rock culture, language that seems meaningful enough to its users. The chapter opens with a quotation that admirably points up the possibility that most psychological research on "learning" has been irrelevant for education because it has focused on the wrong kind of examples of learning. It is hard enough to see what learning nonsense syllables and maze learning by rats has taught us about anything, let alone schooling. Decon-textualizing, a popular term with the authors in talking about their alternative approach can be seen as part of the process of changing the mode or coding the linguistic knowledge. The core insight of the chapter, judged by the frequency of repetition, is probably the claim that a repetition is not a repetition is not a repetition, a claim with interesting self-referent properties.
