ABSTRACT
Learner autonomy is essentially a matter of the learner’s psychological relation to the process and content of learning. We recognise it in a wide variety of behaviours as a capacity for detachment, critical reflection, decision-making and independent action. The various freedoms that autonomy implies are always conditional and constrained, never absolute. As social beings our independence is always balanced by dependence, our essential condition is one of interdependence; total detachment is a principal determining feature not of autonomy but of autism.
