‘In’ or ‘For’ the Learning Society?

Abstract

The Dearing Report on higher education in the UK places itself in the context of ‘he learning society’ It notes a world of change and unpredictability and looks to higher education to assist in the development of the ‘nation’s people’ so as ‘to sustain a competitive economy’. To this end, the Report places significance upon ‘learning’and the need for learners to be ‘enthused’ However, the Report also places a heavy emphasis on the need to develop a range of ‘skills’ thereby falling back onto assumptions of stability – of situations and human responses – which an unpredictable world denies. The Report offers a view of higher education ‘in’ a learning society, responding to given and understood parameters of change. It could, instead, have offered a vision of higher education developing human dispositions capable of creatively helping to generate an uncertain but reflexive world. That would have been a higher education ‘or’a learning society.