THE INHERENT RISKS OF HUMAN LEARNING

摘要

As a distinctive human undertaking, education carries risks that are deep and enduring. It would be true in an everyday sense to say that these risks are often overlooked, or unnoticed. It would be closer to the mark, however, to say that they have been largely domesticated, or even insured against, by the institutional forms education has historically taken, at least in Western civilization. Here, we are clearly not talking about entrepreneurial risks, fueled as these are by the prospects of material profit, though education has more than occasionally been used to promote a sense of individual entrepreneurial spirit. Nor are we talking of the risks an individual might take to achieve fame and glory. Nor yet are we talking of the risks a group of people might take to win human rights or political freedoms. Rather, the risks we are calling attention to here are those that are inescapably — not just contingently — connected with the deliberate promotion of human learning. At stake is nothing less than what we become as human beings as a consequence of what we experience as learners. Such consequences include coming to understand and judge ourselves, our human significance, and our prospects in certain ways rather than in others; coming to understand and judge others and their significance in particular ways; and coming to understand and judge the merits of learning itself in its various forms and possibilities.