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The Routledge International Handbook of Learning

Peter Jarvis, Mary Watts

Introduction

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Introduction
Human learning
Peter Jarvis

Ultimately, learning is intrinsic to human living and if we could fully understand human learning we would
understand human life itself. Moreover, the fact that learning is intrinsic to human life also means that unless
humanity destroys itself or is destroyed by some natural disaster, then humans will continue to learn for as long
as humanity exists, and significantly, humanity and human society are continually developing. In other words,
as Simpson (1995) has argued, humanity is an unfinished project.
(Jarvis, 2006: 199–200)

It was with these words that I concluded my 2006 book on Human Learning, which was the first volume
of a trilogy on lifelong learning and the learning society, and these sentiments also reflected the conclusions
that Parker and I (Jarvis and Parker, 2005) reached in a slightly earlier volume on learning. However, the
fact that humanity is an unfinished project does not mean that, as it develops, it progresses and gets better:
in the following two volumes of the trilogy (Jarvis, 2007, 2008) I tried to show that human society is
still far from perfect and that the hope for a future utopia is deferred indefinitely. The human project is
a procession through time with the potentiality of progression but, as Mary Midgley (2002: 7–8)
has argued, evolution is not a linear escalator to a perfect humanity; it is merely adaptation to a
changing environment. However, learning is more than evolution and so the potentiality of progress as well
as process exists and this might reflect one of the fundamental differences between learning and evolu-
tion – for, from within the bounds of learning lies the potentiality of humanity. Immediately this asks
the question: is the same claim valid for animal learning? Perhaps the only rational response is that, since
animal learning is more than unconscious adaptation to the external environment, this possibility must also
exist and that the creation project is more than merely a project about humanity. However, neither of
the two books cited above included animal learning, although we are beginning to know much more
about it (see MacIntyre, 1999; Tomasello, 1999, inter alia). Although Pavlov’s work was crucial to early
studies of behaviourism and, ultimately, to our understanding of some aspects of human learning, I have not
included animal learning in this book either, although I appreciate that animal learning is an important and
developing branch of the study of learning per se from which we will also continue to learn much about
human learning.
However, our understanding of human learning has advanced considerably since that early behaviourist
definition which suggested that learning is a change in behaviour as a result of experience and more
recently I have defined it as:

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The combination of processes throughout a lifetime whereby the whole person – body (genetic,
physical and biological) and mind (knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, emotions, meaning, beliefs and
senses) – experiences social situations, the content of which is then transformed cognitively, emotively
or practically (or through any combination) and integrated into the individual person’s biography
resulting in a continually changing (or more experienced) person.
(Jarvis, 2009: 25)

It is this definition of learning that underlies this book. In that study (p. 28) I also depicted learning in the
following manner:

The Whole I------------I.~ Time

Person-Body
/Mind/Self
Life History
(11)

Life world
\ Experiences
occurring as a
result of disjuncture
(2)

Thought!
Reflection
(3)

Emotion Action
(4) (5)

Person learns - resolves

disjuncture/gives meaning
/new meaning to experience
/new knowledge /emotions
/skills, etc. or fails to resolve
and lives with disjuncture
(6)

The Person in the world The Changed

(Body/Mind/Self) changed Whole Person
The changes memorised Body/Mind/Self
Person more experienced Life History
(7) (Next learning cycle) (1 2 )

The life-world

Figure I.1 The transformation of the person through learning

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There is a sense, however, in which this diagram is perhaps over-simple in a number of ways: for
instance, the complex relationship between the self that either reacts to or creates the experiences is not
drawn out because disjuncture is not fully discussed; it emphasises the cognitive by placing cognition (see
box 3) in between emotion and action and slightly above them, but all three domains play significant roles
in most kinds of learning and ‘learning to do’ is as fundamental as ‘learning to know’, and perhaps ‘learning
to feel’ is still an underplayed dimension in our understanding of human learning (Damasio, 1999). Once
we acknowledge this, however, any study of learning that does not recognise the significance of the whole
person must necessarily be an incomplete study of this human process. The aim of this book, therefore, is
to demonstrate just how complex learning is and studying it must necessarily be multi-disciplinary since it
must involve all aspects of persons who live both in society and in the natural world.
The aim of this book, therefore, is to lay the foundations for multi-disciplinary studies of human
learning and to show just how complex is the learning process. At the same time, a second aim is to
demonstrate that the complexity of learning can be studied from many different disciplines, and each
chapter provides an opening into the study of learning from a different disciplinary perspective. Consequently,
we are faced with the paradox of depth versus breadth.
The fact that learning is innate suggests that it is in some way intimately related to life itself, especially
conscious life, and so the more we understand about the forces of life, the more we are likely to under-
stand about the processes of learning. But the reverse is also true: the more that we understand learning,
the more we will understand human life, and this book is intended to assist in this process.
The book itself is divided into sections: the first is about personhood; the second about learning
throughout the lifespan; the third about learning across the breadth of human experience; the fourth
recognises that unfortunately not all human beings are born and develop ‘normally’ and so it examines
some learning disabilities – understanding these may actually help us to learn more about human learning;
the fifth section contains a number of studies of learning from the perspective of the academic disciplines –
both the human sciences and the pure sciences; the sixth section shows how some major religious and
social philosophies view learning; and the final section contains a few examples of the way in which cul-
ture and the environment affect our learning. It must be emphasised, however, that each part does not
exhaust the possibilities for that section. It would, for instance, have been quite possible to have included
other aspects of personhood than those that I examined in Learning to be a Person in Society (Jarvis, 2009) in
the first section. Likewise, there are more learning disabilities, more academic disciplines, more religions
and ideologies and a phenomenal number of cultural studies that can enrich our understanding of human
learning. For instance, The Chinese Learner (Watkins and Biggs, 1996) was not discussed here because we
have a chapter on Confucianism in the book and there is not the space for too much duplication. More-
over, each chapter constitutes something of a ‘case study’ of learning from the authors’ perspective and
major studies could be, or have been, conducted about human learning from each of the perspectives
contained in the book.
In a sense this book seeks to build upon the foundations for multi-disciplinary studies of human learning
that were laid in the book Human Learning (Jarvis and Parker, 2005) when Stella Parker and I began this
quest across the disciplines in order to study learning. The chapters in this present book complement those
of the earlier book, but in no way displace them. They all demonstrate approaches to the study of human
learning and illustrate just how they contribute to and enrich our understanding. These chapters, like those
in the previous book, only present the authors’ own perspectives on learning and so each constitutes an
example of how scholars from the different disciplines would and do examine this complex human process.

References
Damasio, A. (1999) The Feeling of What Happens. London: Vintage Books.
Jarvis, P. (2006) Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Human Learning. London: Routledge.

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——(2007) Globalisation, Lifelong Learning and the Learning Society: Sociological Perspectives. London: Routledge.
——(2008) Democracy, Lifelong Learning and the Learning Society: Active Citizenship in a Late Modern Age. London: Routledge.
——(2009) Learning to be a Person in Society. London: Routledge.
Jarvis, P. and Parker, S. (2005) (eds) Human Learning: An Holistic Approach. London: Routledge.
MacIntyre, A. (1999) Dependent Rational Animals. London: Duckworth.
Midgley, M. (2002) Evolution as a Religion. London: Routledge (revised edition).
Simpson, L. (1995) Technology, Time and the Conversations of Modernity. London: Routledge.
Tomasello, M. (1999) The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Watkins, D. and Biggs, J. (1996) (eds) The Chinese Learner: Cultural, Psychological and Contextual Influences. Hong Kong:
The University Comparative Education Research Centre and Victoria: The Australian Council for Educational
Research.