ABSTRACT
A common exclamation when a teacher has had a ‘bad’ lesson is – ‘They have not learned anything!’ but, in reality, the students might have learned a lot, but not always what the teacher intended. The teacher’s aims and objects were not fulfilled and this was the way that non-learning was perceived – it was a form of what Illeris (2007: pp.158-59) called mis-learning, but it was only non-learning in relation to intended learning, as we will show below. It was regarded as non-learning because the focus was always on teaching and the teacher’s aims and objectives, rather than on the students’ learning. However, in recent years a great deal more attention has been paid to individuals’ learning both within and beyond the educational milieu and it has been clearly distinguished from teaching, so that learning and non-learning are now recognised as having as much to do with living as with education. Learning is a personal process; it is both an existential and an experiential process, and non-learning may be conceptualised within this much broader framework. It used to be assumed that social living was conformist and that deviancy was the interesting
phenomenon to be studied. In other words, non-learning – in this case conformity – was assumed to be the norm and this gave rise to the classic formulation of bureaucracy (Weber, 1947), in which new entrants to the organisation learned the rules of social behaviour and thereafter conformed to the prevailing culture: the bureaucratic culture was regarded as unchanging and the individual just fitted in, and so when the concept of the learning organisation appeared as the speed of social living increased, it was regarded as the antithesis of bureaucracy. The same argument can be made for the learning society. However, as we have gained a more sophisticated understanding of learning, so the concept of
non-learning raises more searching questions that help shed some light on our understanding of learning: these relate to consciousness, awareness and perception. In this paper three forms of non-learning are discussed: the state in which a conscious person does not learn, which is existential and experiential; the state when a conscious person is aware of potential learning opportunities but resists them, which is experiential; and the state where the learners do not learn what they were intended to learn, which is also experiential. In order to do this, I want first to revisit my own formulation and extend that discussion and then I will look briefly at two other studies – those of Knud Illeris (2007) and David Hay (2007: 2008) and colleagues.
