We are, all of us, in the business of education. Mortimer Adler, in his Paideia Proposal, distinguishes between ”educatio•n and ”schooling•, considering ”educatio•n to be the life -long process of learning by which an individual becomes an educated person, while ”schooling• is the formal process that you and I administer to the young. My vocabulary is different; what he calls schooling I call education, and what he calls education I call learning. So it will be with others, and there are many, who write or talk on this work we are in, all with different vocabularies. Still, the reader should have no difficulty; just as the string section of an orchestra automatically shifts to a well -tempered scale when the piano breaks into the concerto, so we adjust our interpretations according to the intention of the message. Meaning exceeds definition, we might say, in the same way that a real landscape is more than a map

Cowan, Donald

English

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University of Dallas 
UDigital Commons 
Principals’ Institute at DIHC Institutions & Special Projects 
1990 
Lifelong Learning 
Donald Cowan 
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Mon  19, Lifelong Learning  
       Difference between education and learning  
   Education: The web of knowledge; history as 
index  
          Association; genre; memory  
       Learning: insight, penetration  
 
   We are, all of us, in the business of education. 
Mortimer Adler, in his Paideia Proposal, 
distinguishes between ”educatio•n and ”schooling•, 
considering ”educatio•n to be the life -long process 
of learning by which an individual becomes an 
educated person, while ”schooling• is the formal 
process that you and I administer to the young. My 
vocabulary is different; what he calls schooling I 
call education, and what he calls education I call 
learning. So it will be with others, and there are 
many, who write or talk on this work we are in, all 
with different vocabularies. Still, the reader 
should have no difficulty; just as the string 
section of an orchestra automatically shifts to a 
well -tempered scale when the piano breaks into the  
concerto, so we adjust our interpretations  
according to the intention of the message. Meaning 
exceeds definition, we might say, in the same way 
that a real landscape is more than a map.           
       Education, as I consider it, is a formal 
process, a deliberate instruction in a well defined 
subject directed by a teacher, a tutor, a rabbi, a 
mentor  - - some designated instructor, generally an 
agent of society. Schools are wards of the state, 
either directly through tax support and elected or 
appointed governing boards, or through charters or 
licenses and tax preferences. Being wards, schools 
are expected (by the public, by society) to promote 
the interests of the state and of the economy  - - 
essentially, that is, schools are expected to 
maintain the status quo, with a small growth in the 
right direction. If that description sounds to you 
a bit too rigid for America, try starting an 
experimental college in this state and see if you  
can get licensed.  But I am not protesting. I do 
believe our culture would be healthier if 
constraints allowed more leeway, but, generally, 
the smooth running of a slowly expanding status quo 
has been the proper aim of education. (It is hardly 
sufficient for our present time, however.) 
 
    Let me try on you a definition of education I 
used in an essay some years ago: ["The Uncertainty 
Principle in Education" in ”Unbinding Prometheus:•] 
 ”Education is a formal process of synthetic 
learning (from synthesis, to bring together) in 
which symbolic material is organized into a 
skeletal structure•; on this structure learning from 
experience accumulates in such a fashion that 
meaning is drawn from extended areas of the 
structure. 
 Now let me analyze this statement. Education is a 
process, a sequence of operations headed toward a  
definite end. It is a formal process, following 
rules and established forms; thus it implies a 
social function, an activity duly authorized by 
society, guided by professional authorities, and 
undertaken in an orderly fashion. The process is 
synthetic learning, an artificial action, requiring 
an artfully designed, purposeful amalgamation of 
selected material. The entire ”praxis• (the Greek 
word for action) is symbolic, in that what is 
learned comes to stand for more than itself, to 
suggest intangible and universal ideas, moving 
always toward contemplation, toward being known. In 
the operation, concrete and individual instances 
suggest larger entities, by means of a kind of 
shorthand  - - by modes of thought that make use of 
metaphor, synechdoche, or ellipsis.  Metaphor 
connects one body of material with another, the 
intellect bridging a gap by the discernment of 
similarities. Synechdoche takes the part for the 
whole, calling up an intuition of order and 
harmony; ellipsis engages an incomplete figure that 
must be filled in by an imagination of unity if one 
is to apprehend the entire pattern. These 
tropological processes (twists of logic) are more 
than figures of speech; they are figures of 
thought, the means by which the intellect 
intuitively apprehends meaning. 
 With this analysis in hand, we are saying that 
education makes use of carefully and economically 
selected data purposefully arranged to indicate the 
whole of reality, working by condensation, 
compression, incompleteness, suggestion. The end 
point of the process is the organizing of this 
material into a structure in the minds of students, 
a logical framework within which a student may 
reason from point to point. The structure is to be 
such as to provide an addressable place for true 
learning to reside, whenever it is acquired. 
Meaning, so the definition implies, exists in the 
relationships of these various nodules of learning. 
There it is. Education is a formal process of 
synthetic learning wherein symbolic material is 
organized into a significant structure. 
    The building of this structure, essentially put 
together from inherited materials,  is the business 
of education. The importance of teaching history is 
the providing of addressable points in this 
structure.  When one comes across something that 
happened just before the civil war it can be 
slipped into this structure in the mind in an 
appropriate place that has a meaningful context. 
There are other useful dimensions in this 
structure: categories of writers, scientists, 
artists, and so on.  With a few clues, then, the 
mind can locate an event or person and make rapid 
associations. It is not just remembering: it is 
thinking.  This action has value in the political 
and economic worlds and therefore the promotion of 
this kind of education is in the interest of the 
state. All of this sounds ominous to our democratic 
ears, and has, indeed, been misused. 
     But education serves a cultural purpose as 
well. What do our schools seek to educe in our 
children?  It is not just literacy sufficient to 
read a newspaper and vote right, not just numeracy 
sufficient to work in a technologized economy  - - 
not trained robots. Because education has a 
cultural responsibility, and because we live in a 
democracy, we really do mean to turn out 
independent little entitites called human beings. 
Over and above education, the one essential element 
we must give our young to make them fully human is 
an ability to learn.  With this ability, a person 
can adjust to all the demands of the civic, 
economic and cultural spheres 
     The features of education named above are 
principles to which teachers and academic 
administrators must return periodically in order to 
solidify the enterprise in which they are engaged. 
From time to time it must be clarified that 
education is a symbolic process: it is not the 
gathering of information; it is not life itself 
(not field trips and speeches by businessmen): it 
is an art form, requiring skill in design and skill 
in performance, representing the entire cosmos in 
which the young person finds him or herself, 
pointing toward understanding. From time to time we 
must remember that education and learning are not 
synonymous, that education takes place in a highly 
limited arena at a crucial stage of life (a school, 
usually) and that learning, once initiated, is a 
continuous process undertaken in any circumstance. 
 
 We might notice the predominantly spatial sense 
in which this definition is framed. Education in 
its interstices is spatial. And, indeed, education 
as an activity occurs in a restricted space and is 
socially directed - -a communal affair. Learning, on 
the other hand, is quite a different activity. It 
is informal, natural, concerned with actual things, 
loosely organized in such a fashion that meaning is 
local and specific. It is a lifelong pursuit, 
internally directed, and intensely personal. 
 We can teach education. We cannot teach learning. 
We can only educe it out of the student. Something 
happens inside  - - but we've already talked about 
that.  Of course education and learning are 
related, quite intimately, just as are, in physics, 
momentum and energy, but they are independent in 
the mathematical sense of being of different 
degrees, in the sense that x is of first degree, 
x{2} is of second. (Please forgive this little 
metaphoric flight of fancy in my discipline.) In 
the uncertainty principle, momentum is conjugate to 
space, energy is conjugate to time, The conjugates 
are joined to each other reciprocally  - - the more 
you have of one, the less you have of the other.. 
  Like momentum, education is first order; it is 
the thing one is doing while one is doing it. It 
has a direct, vector -like quality about it. 
Education is conjugate to - -is joined to - -”space• in 
this analogical scheme of things. Its spaces are 
the campus, the laboratory, the classroom. And in 
this relation to space is to be found the 
reciprocity arrangement of conjugates. Education 
intensifies as space diminishes, focusing in a 
small arena such as a school. In the broad 
stretches of existence, in life generally, 
education diminishes to a level of non -existence. 
Only a deliberate return to the semblance of a 
classroom for an hour, an evening, a week can again 
institute education. 
 Learning, in contrast, is second degree and 
exceeds education, as x{2} is of a higher order of 
being than x. Learning is done while one is really 
doing something else. It is a received quality, 
something possessed, not going anywhere, the scalar 
product of vectors. Like energy, learning is 
conjugate with time. The times of learning are life 
time, job time, schooling time, the academic year, 
the semester, the class period. And again, as the 
time span shortens, learning intensifies. (Remember 
not to make education and learning conjugate  - - it 
is false to say that the more you educate, the less 
you learn!) 
 All of this schematization is little more than an 
ingenious metaphor or a kind of metaphysical 
conceit, one might be justified in saying: that is, 
one might charge that I have extended a limited 
analogy between two areas so far that it is made to 
represent a purported total reality. And so I no 
doubt have. But the virtue of a metaphorical 
expedition is the realignment of the landscape when 
viewed through various exaggerations and 
distortions. The salient features become well 
separated. It is at least for some of us 
instructive to distinguish education and learning 
as sharply as this approach demands. Any battle 
against behaviorism, any disdain for mnemonic 
learning must then stand in review, particularly if 
one's own mode of instruction seeks always to 
engender insight. "See, see," one shouts, and 
occasionally someone does. And that look of joy on 
a single face is sufficient reward to reinforce 
belief in one's method. But now, as we view the 
educational process through the present set of 
analogies, we must grant the efficacy of mundane 
instruction, the patient construction of the 
logical framework for knowledge. It is the same 
framework for the whole class, a framework that 
will perdure in the enveloping society. ”The 
construction of that meaningful framework is the 
business of education•. Otherwise the acquisition of 
knowledge becomes mere information - gathering. The 
relation of such a frame to learning is the making 
of a habitat, a nesting place for insights which 
will come, willy -nilly, when they choose. 
 Insights are those intense experiences of 
learning that occur in brief moments, in flashes, 
one by one to each person individually. Education 
does contribute to learning - -synthetic learning, I 
have called it - -but, just as for energy, two other 
sources exist for learning: experience that, like 
potential energy, is an interaction with 
environment; and instinctive knowledge that, like 
rest mass energy, comes with existence itself. It 
seems that insights should happen more frequently 
in the precious educational space than in the 
outside world; but whether they develop then or 
years later, they come to the person, not to the 
class. Education supplies only a portion of 
learning. Its function is not so much to supply 
learning as to ready people for the task of 
learning.   
 
 We could say that by the beginning of the 
Odyssey, Telemachus has already been educated; his 
old nurse and his mother  - - as well as Phemius, the 
poet  - - have seen to his tutelage in the right 
values.  He has his heritage of understanding, his 
structure.  But it is not until Athena comes that 
learning begins: and, as always, learning begins in 
insight. 
 Learning and insight give rise to joy and a 
suffusion of beauty, whereas education yields at 
most satisfaction.**** 
 ******Or s.******** But, as we know from other 
evidence, the age of analysis is over. In 
separating the parts of the process so absolutely, 
I have been putting new insights into old 
methodologies. The result is not so much wrong as 
irrelevant - -old -fashioned. Such a procedure is a 
reduction of a vital body into its parts. And, as 
we all know, one does not tell time by taking the 
watch apart. For a good while now, meaning has not 
been sought in analysis, not really even in 
synthesis, but in a quest for unity. Indeed, the 
mark of twentieth -century thought is this quest.. 
That idea of universal equality, with its many 
analogues in politics, philosophy, and literary 
criticism, has thoroughly pervaded society with 
profound effects that are still working their way 
out and that will eventually change not only 
education but the encompassing style of our 
culture.** 
 
In reconceiving our own work toward new ends, if 
any one strategy does not work, then some other one 
must, since the age demands equality. In the past 
we have begun logically with the simplest and most 
boring ideas - -inclined planes, pulleys, bouncing 
balls - -expecting to build up a quantitative 
competency adequate for  later advanced ideas. This 
method is like expecting Ferdinand to hew wood and 
draw water before he has ever seen Miranda - -or 
making Dante undergo his laborious climb through 
the cosmos without ever having seen the face of 
Beatrice. We have to let him at least peek. What 
must be held up in the early stages is a vision of 
completeness splendid in its universality. 
 What I am saying is that education in our time 
needs to desert the outmoded analytic approach and 
move toward a holistic concern. Throughout the 
entire curriculum we need to readjust our stance, 
not through sentimental condescension, but through 
a frank and imaginative reseeing of our disciplines 
in their most fundamental aspects. Those of us who 
profess a discipline need to meld with it, go where 
it wants to go, let it choose the path of least 
action, lose the least energy to friction. We need 
to trust it. In new soil our discipline will likely 
blossom anew. 


Lifelong Learning

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Lifelong Learning

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