ABSTRACT
Three non-reflective learning responses were itemised in the second chapter of this study; pre-conscious, skills/practice and memorisation. In many ways these are the most common forms of learning that occur in everyday life, and also they are the ones that are most frequently defined socially as learning. Additionally, they are the ones that most people seem to think that initial education instils into its participants, so that ‘good’ teaching is regarded as being able to get students to reproduce the knowledge/skills, etc. with which they have been prepared. Indeed, analyses such as Bourdieu’s and Passeron’s (1977) point to the fact that education is viewed as a means of cultural reproduction which, in turn, demands that the forms of learning be dominantly non-reflective. Indeed, they argue that certain forms of teaching are symbolic violence, since they seek to impose upon learners arbitrarily a cultural form which may be foreign to them. Hence, it must be recognised that where imposition occurs there is a power relationship in existence and that this is implict in many forms of education. Indeed, this was the point made earlier, following the suggestion by Yonge (1985), that pedagogy and andragogy reflect different ways by which the learner is accompanied through the learning experience, so that children are less likely to feel on equal status with their adult teachers and so they learn (memorise) what is required of them. However, adults might be expected to learn a skill or memorise a procedure of a regulation, in the same way that children are expected to learn their mathematical tables at school, and so this might be viewed as a form of pedagogy which results in conformity. This is not to deny that reflective learning might also produce conformity, but it is to suggest that non-reflective learning cannot result in innovation. By contrast, adults in other learning situations may feel on a more equal status to their teachers and might, therefore, engage in a more reflective form of learning.
