The ‘Learner’ Identity [i]

Attend your local school board meeting. Listen to those frigid statements you’ll hear from educational institutions — usually after receiving some bad media coverage — about their priority of ensuring ‘positive learning environments’ for their students. There is no doubt, education in our society has become increasingly concerned, maybe obsessed, with the achievement of good outcomes. Of course, ‘good’ is always a morphing compendium of societal opinion.

At certain times in history, ‘good learning outcomes’ was thought to require a transactional model of education, which required obedience and passivity towards the teacher as a possessor of knowledge. In today’s increasingly corporatized university, these good outcomes are now mostly concerned with making things easily consumable to the student. The Italian cultural theorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi argues that this is one of the most pernicious and ubiquitous expressions of power in our neo-liberal historical moment: power, he says, referencing the words of Bill Gates himself, resides in “making things easy”. [ii]

One consequence of these modern consumer models of education is the phenomenon of e-learning. In e-learning culture, extreme emphasis is put on facilitating learning. Learning must be available when the student wants it, at any time, and more than this, be palpable and enjoyable on the student’s terms. It has to be easy. As I am part of the drifting mass of precarious PhD labour, hopping from one short-term contract to the next, I’ve seen firsthand how often the truly educative qualities of schooling can become stripped away through these ‘online learning environments’. Education, and the very idea of ‘school’ itself I will argue, is about taking time out of productive life to study with others in a shared world.

After my own experiences teaching undergrad e-learning classes — witnessing widespread disengagement from my fellow instructors and professors, and the general alienation from students with each other — I began to wonder about the extent that we as teachers can even facilitate this ‘easy’ learning asked of us. Learning involves a person’s presence; it also involves an encounter with something unknown, something new, and thus requires vulnerability and exposure. [iii] In fact, it would seem that learning isn’t really easy at all, for it cannot be easily determined or implemented. Through my ‘e-teaching’, I gradually began to ask:

“What kind of learning is this, which calls for no productive effort on the part of the learner, nor even for his presence, which replaces the teacher by a programme, which severs head from body, mind from world, and immunises the learner from the potentially corrupting effect of any disturbance from outside by means of a productive shield?” [iv]

This rise in ‘e-learning’ culture, and its virtually unquestioned acceptance in schools and universities, can be better understood through a phenomenon that the educational philosopher Gert Biesta labels, with a deliberately ugly term, learnification.

Learnification refers to the effects of the prevalent language and ‘discourse of learning’ that has dominated educational circles for around two decades. These effects are evident in several all-too-perceptible educational trends: the attribution, by educational and governmental institutions, such as UNESCO, of the ‘learner identity’ to all — even those not currently undergoing educational programs — and the rise in simplistic learner-centric discourses that limit or diminish the role of teaching. Lifelong learning has gradually usurped the older coinage life-long education without many taking notice. [v] But the change was deliberate and ultimately ideological: life-long learning has an economic rationale; it is about the development of human-capital.

The English word ‘learning’ aside from being a process term, is an individuating term. The individualizing aspect of the language of learning has “shifted attention away from the importance of relationships in educational processes”. [vi] Very easily, as Biesta points out, learning becomes a tool of neoliberal policy. Political problems quickly become “learning problems” (ibid. p. 67) and individuals are responsible for being ‘lifelong learners’, which in this narrow context basically means that they are “responsible for keeping up their employability in rapidly changing global markets” (ibid.). He continues: “the issue is entirely defined as a question of individual adaptation and adjustment– as a matter of learning –and not as one about structural issues and collective responsibilities”.

This discourse has major consequences to the very way we practice and think about education, according to Biesta:

“The quickest way to express what is at stake here is to say that the point of education is never that children or students learn, but that they learn something, that they learn this for particular purposes, and that they learn this from someone. The problem with the language of learning and with the wider ‘learnification’ of educational discourse is that it makes it far more difficult, if not impossible, to ask the crucial educational questions about content, purpose and relationships.” [vii]

Learnification makes exploring these ‘qualitative’ educational dynamics irrelevant and has the unwanted effect of ‘naturalizing’ the concept — presenting learning as something everyone implicitly does, without explaining why or how. I want to show in this short essay that the reduction of education to something individualized and controllable runs completely antithetical to the understanding of education that is implied in the word ‘school’ itself.

Ford Nation takes on Education

Learnification, as expressed in much ‘e-learning’ that happens these days, is a market-driven expression of a far more prevalent cultural conviction that learning should be operationalized in the service of society.

Doug Ford’s new conservative government in Ontario is a perfect testament to this way of thinking. In just a few short weeks after taking office he scrapped the newly developed sex Ed curriculum, reverting it to its 1998 iteration, promising along with these changes, the creation of a website (what critics call a ‘snitch line’) from which students and parents can report ‘problem’ teachers who refuse to teach this newly 20 year backslidden curriculum. [viii] Immediately following his election win, Ford repeated his campaign talk for a “back to basics” approach for his government’s reform of Ontario’s public education. [ix] As we’ve seen over and over, generally what these ‘back to basics’ pronouncements imply is greater standardized measures for students and educational staff, and reduced funding and curricular emphasis on the fine arts and humanities (music, art, creative writing, dance, theatre, etc.).

Education for Doug Ford is about control, accountability, and productivity. His government has specifically challenged the recent emphasis on “inquiry driven education” in the province’s new curriculum and endorsed a return to more standardized methods of pedagogy and evaluation; a return to “proven teaching methods” they say. As public intellectuals like Henry Giroux have long emphasised, the trend towards increasing standardization in North American schools has only grown since the 1980’s and shows little evidence of slowing down. According to Giroux, this is an example of a form of neoliberal pedagogical terrorism in which “any collective struggle to preserve education as a basis for creating critical citizens is rendered defunct within the corporate drive for efficiency, a logic that has inspired bankrupt reform initiatives such as standardization, high stakes testing, rigid accountability schemes, and privatization”. [x]

Neo-liberal think-tanks like British Columbia’s Fraser Institute often lament public school’s low ratings (a rating they mostly determined through standardized testing) as a way to rebuke public schools generally, before going on to (over)emphasise the burden public schools have on the taxpayer. Public schools, to these arguments, seem to represent the lingering residues of a failed socialist dream –one of the last barriers in the way of total market-driven education. The problem I see with these political arguments and strategies for ‘school reform’ largely resides in the fact that they seem to have little understanding of what ‘school’ really means.