ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses examples of learners who are addressed and learners who are not addressed by shaping agents. They illustrate two routes to learning: through the learner's own initiating action, or through the initiating and shaping action of some other. Our assumption is that the first is by far the most frequent route, all through life, from the very first to the very last breath of a human being, with one important qualification, which people mention in a moment. The chapter resonates with what the German educational anthropologist Christoph Wulf describes as mimesis. He writes: Social actions may provisionally be described as mimetic if, as gestures, they refer to other gestures; if they can be understood as a corporeal performance or staging; and if they are autonomous actions, comprehensible in their own right, and at the same time related to other actions or worlds.
