Jean Lave, Etienne Wengerand communities of practiceJean.docx

Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger
and communities of practice
Jean Lave, Etiene Wenger and communities of practice.
The idea that learning involves a deepening process of
participation in a community of practice has gained
significant ground in recent years. Communities of
practice have also become an important focus within
organizational development and have considerable value
when thinking about working with groups. In this article
we outline the theory and practice of such communities,
and examine some of issues and questions for informal
educators and those concerned with lifelong learning.
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contents: introduction · communities of practice ·
legitimate peripheral participation and situated learning ·
learning organizations and learning communities ·
conclusion · references · links · how to cite this article
Many of the ways we have of talking about learning and

education are based on the assumption that learning is
something that individuals do. Furthermore, we often
assume that learning ‘has a beginning and an end; that it is
best separated from the rest of our activities; and that it is
the result of teaching’ (Wenger 1998: 3). But how would
things look if we took a different track? Supposing learning
is social and comes largely from of our experience of
participating in daily life? It was this thought that formed
the basis of a significant rethinking of learning theory in the
late 1980s and early 1990s by two researchers from very
different disciplines – Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. Their
model of situated learning proposed that learning involved
a process of engagement in a ‘community of practice’.
Jean Lave was (and is) a social anthropologist with a strong
interest in social theory, based at the University of
California, Berkeley. Much of her work has focused on on
the ‘re-conceiving’ of learning, learners, and educational
institutions in terms of social practice. When looking closely

at everyday activity, she has argued, it is clear that ‘learning
is ubiquitous in ongoing activity, though often unrecognized
as such’ (Lave 1993: 5).
log in
http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-learn.htm
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Etienne Wenger was a teacher who joined the Institute for
Research on Learning, Palo Alto having gained a Ph.D. in
artificial intelligence from the University of California at
Irvine. (He is now an independent consultant specializing in
developing communities of practice within organizations).
Their path-breaking analysis, first published in Situated
Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation (1991) and
later augmented in works by Jean Lave (1993) and Etienne
Wenger (1999; 2002) set the scene for some significant
innovations in practice within organizations and more

recently within some schools (see Rogoff et al 2001).
Communities of practice
The basic argument made by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger
is that communities of practice are everywhere and that we
are generally involved in a number of them – whether that
is at work, school, home, or in our civic and leisure
interests. Etienne Wenger was later to write:
Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a
process of collective learning in a shared domain of human
endeavour: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking
new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on
similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in
the
school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a
gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. In a
nutshell: Communities of practice are groups of people who
share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn
how to do it better as they interact regularly. (Wenger circa
2007)

In some groups we are core members, in others we are
more at the margins.
Being alive as human beings means that we are constantly
engaged in the pursuit of enterprises of all kinds, from ensuring
our physical survival to seeking the most lofty pleasures. As we
define these enterprises and engage in their pursuit together, we
interact with each other and with the world and we tune our
relations with each other and with the world accordingly. In
other words we learn.
Over time, this collective learning results in practices that
reflect
both the pursuit of our enterprises and the attendant social
relations. These practices are thus the property of a kind of
community created over time by the sustained pursuit of a
shared enterprise. It makes sense, therefore to call these kinds
of communities communities of practice. (Wenger 1998: 45)
The characteristics of such communities of practice vary.

Some have names, many do not. Some communities of
practice are quite formal in organization, others are very
fluid and informal. However, members are brought together
by joining in common activities and by ‘what they have
learned through their mutual engagement in these
activities’ (Wenger 1998). In this respect, a community of
practice is different from a community of interest or a
geographical community in that it involves a shared
practice.
The characteristics of communities of practice
According to Etienne Wenger (c 2007), three elements are
crucial in distinguishing a community of practice from other
groups and communities:
The domain. A community of practice is is something more
than a club of friends or a network of connections between
people. ‘It has an identity defined by a shared domain of
interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to

the domain, and therefore a shared competence that
distinguishes members from other people’ (op. cit.).
The community. ‘In pursuing their interest in their domain,
members engage in joint activities and discussions, help
each other, and share information. They build relationships
that enable them to learn from each other’ (op. cit.).
The practice. ‘Members of a community of practice are
practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of
resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing
recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes
time and sustained interaction’ (op. cit.).
Relationships, identity and shared interests and
repertoire
A community of practice involves, thus, much more than the
technical knowledge or skill associated with undertaking
some task. Members are involved in a set of relationships
over time (Lave and Wenger 1991: 98) and communities
develop around things that matter to people (Wenger 1998).
The fact that they are organizing around some particular

area of knowledge and activity gives members a sense of
joint enterprise and identity. For a community of practice to
function it needs to generate and appropriate a shared
repertoire of ideas, commitments and memories. It also
needs to develop various resources such as tools,
documents, routines, vocabulary and symbols that in some
way carry the accumulated knowledge of the community. In
other words, it involves practice (see praxis): ways of doing
and approaching things that are shared to some significant
extent among members.
The interactions involved, and the ability to undertake
larger or more complex activities and projects though
cooperation, bind people together and help to facilitate
relationship and trust (see the discussion of community
elsewhere on these pages). Communities of practice can be
seen as self-organizing systems and have many of the
benefits and characteristics of associational life such as the

generation of what Robert Putnam and others have
discussed as social capital.
Legitimate peripheral participation and situated learning
Rather than looking to learning as the acquisition of certain
forms of knowledge, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger have
tried to place it in social relationships – situations of co-
participation. As William F. Hanks puts it in his introduction
to their book: ‘Rather than asking what kind of cognitive
processes and conceptual structures are involved, they ask
what kinds of social engagements provide the proper
context for learning to take place’ (1991: 14). It not so much
that learners acquire structures or models to understand
the world, but they participate in frameworks that that have
structure. Learning involves participation in a community of
practice. And that participation ‘refers not just to local
events of engagement in certain activities with certain
http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-praxis.htm
http://www.infed.org/community/community.htm
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people, but to a more encompassing process of being active
participants in the practices of social communities and
constructing identities in relation to these communities’
(Wenger 1999: 4).
Lave and Wenger illustrate their theory by observations of
different apprenticeships (Yucatec midwives, Vai and Gola
tailors, US Navy quartermasters, meat-cutters, and non-
drinking alcoholics in Alcoholics Anonymous). Initially
people have to join communities and learn at the periphery.
The things they are involved in, the tasks they do may be
less key to the community than others.
As they become more competent they become more
involved in the main processes of the particular community.
They move from legitimate peripheral participation to into
‘full participation (Lave and Wenger 1991: 37). Learning is,
thus, not seen as the acquisition of knowledge by

individuals so much as a process of social participation. The
nature of the situation impacts significantly on the process.
Learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners
and… the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers
to
move toward full participation in the socio-cultural practices of
a
community. “Legitimate peripheral participation” provides a
way
to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-
timers, and about activities, identities, artefacts, and
communities of knowledge and practice. A person’s intentions
to
learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured
through the process of becoming a full participant in a socio-
cultural practice. This social process, includes, indeed it
subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills. (Lave and
Wenger 1991: 29)
In this there is a concern with identity, with learning to
speak, act and improvise in ways that make sense in the

community. What is more, and in contrast with learning as
internalization, ‘learning as increasing participation in
communities of practice concerns the whole person acting
in the world’ (Lave and Wenger 1991: 49). The focus is on
the ways in which learning is ‘an evolving, continuously
renewed set of relations’ (ibid.: 50). In other words, this is a
relational view of the person and learning (see the
discussion of selfhood).
Situated learning
This way of approaching learning is something more than
simply ‘learning by doing’ or experiential learning. As Mark
Tennant (1997: 73) has pointed out, Jean Lave’s and Etienne
Wenger’s concept of situatedness involves people being full
participants in the world and in generating meaning. ‘For
newcomers’, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991: 108-9)
comment, ‘the purpose is not to learn from talk as a
substitute for legitimate peripheral participation; it is to
learn to talk as a key to legitimate peripheral participation’.

This orientation has the definite advantage of drawing
attention to the need to understand knowledge and
learning in context. However, situated learning depends on
two claims:
It makes no sense to talk of knowledge that is
decontextualized, abstract or general.
http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-self.htm
http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-explrn.htm
New knowledge and learning are properly conceived as
being located in communities of practice (Tennant 1997:
77).
Questions can be raised about both of these claims. It may
be, with regard to the first claim, for example, that learning
can occur that is seemingly unrelated to a particular context
or life situation.
Second, there may situations where the community of
practice is weak or exhibits power relationships that
seriously inhibit entry and participation. There is a risk, as

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger acknowledge, of
romanticizing communities of practice. However, there has
been a tendency in their earlier work of falling into this trap.
‘In their eagerness to debunk testing, formal education and
formal accreditation, they do not analyse how their
omission [of a range of questions and issues] affects power
relations, access, public knowledge and public
accountability’ (Tennant 1997: 79). Their interest in the
forms of learning involved communities of practice shares
some common element with Ivan Illich’s advocacy of
learning webs and informal education. However, where Jean
Lave and Etienne Wenger approached the area through an
exploration of local encounters and examples, Ivan Illich
started with a macro-analysis of the debilitating effects of
institutions such as schooling. In both cases the sweep of
their arguments led to an under-appreciation of the uses of
more formal structures and institutions for learning.
However, this was understandable given the scale of the

issues and problems around learning within
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm
professionalized and bureaucratic institutions such as
schools their respective analyses revealed.
Learning organizations and learning communities
These ideas have been picked-up most strongly within
organizational development circles. The use of the
apprenticeship model made for a strong set of connections
with important traditions of thinking about training and
development within organizations. Perhaps more
significantly, the growing interest in ‘the learning
organization‘ in the 1990s alerted many of those concerned
with organizational development to the significance of
informal networks and groupings. Jean Lave’s and Etienne
Wenger’s work around communities of practice offered a
useful addition. It allowed proponents to argue that
communities of practice needed to be recognized as

valuable assets. The model gave those concerned with
organizational development a way of thinking about how
benefits could accrue to the organization itself, and how
value did not necessarily lie primarily with the individual
members of a community of practice.
Acknowledging that communities of practice affect performance
is important in part because of their potential to overcome the
inherent problems of a slow-moving traditional hierarchy in a
fast-moving virtual economy. Communities also appear to be an
effective way for organizations to handle unstructured problems
and to share knowledge outside of the traditional structural
boundaries. In addition, the community concept is
acknowledged to be a means of developing and maintaining
long-term organizational memory. These outcomes are an
important, yet often unrecognized, supplement to the value that
http://www.infed.org/biblio/learning-organization.htm
individual members of a community obtain in the form of
enriched learning and higher motivation to apply what they

learn. (Lesser and Storck 2001)
Lesser and Storck go on to argue that the social capital
resident in communities of practice leads to behavioural
change—’change that results in greater knowledge sharing,
which in turn positively influences business performance’.
Attention to communities of practice could, thus enhance
organizational effectiveness and profitability.
For obvious reasons, formal education institutions have
been less ready to embrace these ideas. There was a very
real sense in which the direction of the analysis
undermined their reason for being and many of their
practices. However, there have been some significant
explorations of how schooling, for example, might
accommodate some of the key themes and ideas in Jean
Lave’s and Etienne Wenger’s analysis. In particular, there
was significant mileage in exploring how communities of
practice emerge within schooling, the process involved and
how they might be enhanced. Furthermore, there was also

significant possibility in a fuller appreciation of what
constitutes practice (as earlier writers such Carr and
Kemmis 1986, and Grundy 1987 had already highlighted:
see curriculum and praxis). Perhaps the most helpful of
these explorations is that of Barbara Rogoff and her
colleagues (2001). They examine the work of an innovative
school in Salt Lake City and how teachers, students and
parents were able to work together to develop an approach
to schooling based around the principle that learning
http://www.infed.org/biblio/social_capital.htm
http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-curric.htm
‘occurs through interested participation with other
learners’.
Conclusion – issues and implications for educators and
animateurs
Jean Lave’s and Etienne Wenger’s concern here with
learning through participation in group/collective life and
engagement with the ‘daily round’ makes their work of

particular interest to informal educators and those
concerned with working with groups. These are themes that
have part of the informal education tradition for many
years – but the way in which Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger
have developed an understanding of the nature of learning
within communities of practice, and how knowledge is
generated allows educators to think a little differently about
the groups, networks and associations with which they are
involved. It is worth looking more closely at the processes
they have highlighted.
The notion of community of practice and the broader
conceptualization of situated learning provides significant
pointers for practice. Here I want to highlight three:
Learning is in the relationships between people. As
McDermott (in Murphy 1999:17) puts it:
Learning traditionally gets measured as on the assumption that
it is a possession of individuals that can be found inside their
heads… [Here] learning is in the relationships between people.

Learning is in the conditions that bring people together and
organize a point of contact that allows for particular pieces of
http://www.infed.org/hp-intro.htm
information to take on a relevance; without the points of
contact, without the system of relevancies, there is not learning,
and there is little memory. Learning does not belong to
individual persons, but to the various conversations of which
they are a part.
Within systems oriented to individual accreditation, and
that have lost any significant focus on relationship through
pressures on them to meet centrally-determined targets,
this approach to learning is challenging and profoundly
problematic. It highlights just how far the frameworks for
schooling, lifelong learning and youth work in states like
Britain and Northern Ireland have drifted away from a
proper appreciation of what constitutes learning (or indeed
society). Educators have a major educational task with
policymakers as well as participants in their programmes

and activities.
Educators work so that people can become participants
in communities of practice. Educators need to explore
with people in communities how all may participate to the
full. One of the implications for schools, as Barbara Rogoff
and her colleagues suggest is that they must prioritize
‘instruction that builds on children’s interests in a
collaborative way’. Such schools need also to be places
where ‘learning activities are planned by children as well as
adults, and where parents and teachers not only foster
children’s learning but also learn from their own
involvement with children’ (2001: 3). Their example in this
area have particular force as they are derived from actual
school practice.
http://www.infed.org/biblio/relationship.htm
A further, key, element is the need to extend associational
life within schools and other institutions. Here there is a

strong link here with long-standing concerns among
informal educators around community and participation
and for the significance of the group (for schooling see the
discussion of informal education and schooling; for youth
work see young people and association; and for
communities see community participation).
There is an intimate connection between knowledge
and activity. Learning is part of daily living as Eduard
Lindeman argued many years ago. Problem solving and
learning from experience are central processes (although,
as we have seen, situated learning is not the same as
‘learning by doing’ – see Tennant 1997: 73). Educators need
to reflect on their understanding of what constitutes
knowledge and practice. Perhaps one of the most important
things to grasp here is the extent to which education
involves informed and committed action.
These are fascinating areas for exploration and, to some
significant extent, take informal educators in a completely

different direction to the dominant pressure towards
accreditation and formalization.
Further reading
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) Situated Learning.
Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge: University
of Cambridge Press. 138 pages. Pathbreaking book that first
developed the idea that learning ‘is a process of
http://www.infed.org/association/b-assoc.htm
http://www.infed.org/community/community.htm
http://www.infed.org/groupwork/early_group_work.htm
http://www.infed.org/schooling/inf-sch.htm
http://www.infed.org/youthwork/ypandassoc.htm
http://www.infed.org/community/b-compar.htm
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-lind.htm
http://www.infed.org/biblio/knowledge.htm
participation in communities of practice, participation that
is at first legitimately peripheral but that increases gradually
in engagement and complexity’.
Rogoff, B., Turkanis, C. G. and Bartlett, L. (eds.) (2001)
Learning Together: Children and Adults in a School
Community, New York: Oxford University Press. 250 + x

pages. Arising out of the collaboration of Barbara Rogoff
(who had worked with Jean Lave) with two teachers at an
innovative school in Salt Lake City, this book explores how
they were able to develop an approach to schooling based
around the principle that learning ‘occurs through
interested participation with other learners’.
Etienne Wenger (1999) Communities of Practice. Learning,
meaning and identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. 318 + xv pages. Extended discussion of the concept of
community of practice and how it might be approached
within organizational development and education.
References
Allee, V. (2000) ‘Knowledge networks and communities of
learning’, OD Practitioner 32( 4),
http://www.odnetwork.org/odponline/vol32n4/knowledgenets.ht
ml.
Accessed December 30, 2002.
Bandura, A. (1977) Social Learning Theory, Englewood Cliffs,

NJ: Prentice Hall.
Carr, W. and Kemmis, S. (1986) Becoming Critical.
Education, knowledge and action research, Lewes: Falmer.
ml
Gardner, H. (1993) Intelligence Reframed. Multiple
intelligences for the 21st century, New York: Basic Books.
Grundy, S. (1987) Curriculum: Product or praxis, Lewes:
Falmer.
Lave, J. (1982). A comparative approach to educational
forms and learning processes. Anthropology and Education
Quarterly, 13(2): 181-187
Lave, Jean (1988). Cognition in practice: mind, mathematics
and culture in everyday life. New York: Cambridge
University Press
Lave, Jean ‘Teaching, as learning, in practice’, Mind, Culture,
and Activity (3)3: 149-164
Lave, Jean (forthcoming) Changing Practice: The Politics of

Learning and Everyday Life
Lave, Jean and Chaiklin, Seth (eds.) (1993) Understanding
Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context, Cambridge:
University of Cambridge Press.
Lesser, E. L. and Storck, J. (2001) ‘Communities of practice
and organizational performance’, IBM Systems Journal
40(4),
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/404/lesser.html.
Accessed December 30, 2002.
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/404/lesser.html
Merriam, S. and Caffarella (1991, 1998) Learning in
Adulthood. A comprehensive guide, San Francisco: Jossey-
Bass.
Murphy, P. (ed.) (1999) Learners, Learning and Assessment,
London: Paul Chapman. See, also, Leach, J. and Moon, B.
(eds.) (1999) Learners and Pedagogy, London: Paul
Chapman. 280 + viii pages; and McCormick, R. and Paetcher,
C. (eds.) (1999) Learning and Knowledge, London: Paul

Chapman. 254 + xiv pages.
Ramsden, P. (1992) Learning to Teach in Higher Education,
London: Routledge.
Rogoff, Barbara and Lave, Jean (eds.) (1984) Everyday
Cognition: Its Development in Social Context. Cambridge
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Salomon, G. (ed.) (1993) Distributed Cognitions.
Psychological and educational considerations, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Smith, M. K. (1999) ‘The social/situational orientation to
learning’, the encyclopedia of informal education,
www.infed.org/biblio/learning-social.htm.
Tennant, M. (1988, 1997) Psychology and Adult Learning,
London: Routledge.
http://www.infed.org/biblio/learning-social.htm
Tennant, M. and Pogson, P. (1995) Learning and Change in
the Adult Years. A developmental perspective, San

Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Wenger, Etienne (1998) ‘Communities of Practice. Learning
as a social system’, Systems Thinker, http://www.co-i-
l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml. Accessed
December 30, 2002.
Wenger, Etienne (c 2007) ‘Communities of practice. A brief
introduction’. Communities of practice
[http://www.ewenger.com/theory/. Accessed January 14,
2009].
Wenger, Etienne and Richard McDermott, and William
Snyder (2002) Cultivating communities of practice: a guide
to managing knowledge. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Business School Press.
Links
Etienne Wenger’s homepage: has some material on
communities of practice.
Communities of Practice discussion group: maintained by
John Smith at Yahoo.

Acknowledgements: The picture ‘Community of practice’ is
taken from sonson’s photosream at Flickr
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/sonson/422595428/] and
reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-
Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic Licence.
http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml
http://www.ewenger.com/theory/
http://www.ewenger.com/
ml
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sonson/422595428/
How to cite this article: Smith, M. K. (2003, 2009) ‘Jean
Lave, Etienne Wenger and communities of practice’, the
encyclopedia of informal education,
www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm.
© Mark K. Smith 2003, 2009
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P.O. Box 3333
Jacksonville, FL 32256Annual Demographics Report
The Blue Wave Marathon Club has completed another
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<Pie Chart>
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<Excel Data>
Team DemographicsBlue Wave Marathon Team2016Number of
People1st Year Students552nd Year Students203rd Year
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Demographics Chart
Number of People
1st Year Students 2nd Year Students 3rd Year Students
4th Year Students 55.0 20.0 30.0 15.0
Marathon EventsBlue Wave Marathon Team20161st Year
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StudentsTotalMarine Corps Half Marathon15252060ZOOMA
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Chapter 15

A social theory of learning
Etienne Wenger
American Etienne Wenger was born in the French-speaking part
of Switzerland and, as
a young man, he lived in Hong Kong for three years. Later he
studied computer science
in Switzerland and the US, fi nishing by writing a dissertation
on artifi cial intelligence.
For ten years he was then a researcher at the Institute for
Research on Learning in Palo
Alto, California, and it was by the end of this period that he,
together with Jean Lave,
published the famous book Situated Learning: Legitimate
Peripheral Participation
in 1991. This book also launched the concept of “communities
of practice” as the
environment of important learning, a term Wenger cemented in
1998 and elaborated
further in his book Communities of Practice: Learning,
meaning, and identity.
The following chapter is made up of the more programmatic
part of the introduction to
that book and a note in which Wenger gives an account of his
understanding of other
important approaches to learning.
Introduction
Our institutions, to the extent that they address issues of
learning explicitly,
are largely based on the assumption that learning is an
individual process,
that it has a beginning and an end, that it is best separated from
the rest

of our activities, and that it is the result of teaching. Hence we
arrange
classrooms where students – free from the distractions of their
participation
in the outside world – can pay attention to a teacher or focus on
exercises.
We design computer-based training programs that walk students
through
individualized sessions covering reams of information and drill
practice.
To assess learning, we use tests with which students struggle in
one-on-
one combat, where knowledge must be demonstrated out of
context, and
where collaborating is considered cheating. As a result, much of
our
institutionalized teaching and training is perceived by would-be
learners as
irrelevant, and most of us come out of this treatment feeling
that learning
is boring and arduous, and that we are not really cut out for it.
So, what if we adopted a different perspective, one that placed
learning
in the context of our lived experience of participation in the
world? What
if we assumed that learning is as much a part of our human
nature as eating
210 Etienne Wenger
or sleeping, that it is both life-sustaining and inevitable, and
that – given a

chance – we are quite good at it? And what if, in addition, we
assumed that
learning is, in its essence, a fundamentally social phenomenon,
refl ecting our
own deeply social nature as human beings capable of knowing?
What kind
of understanding would such a perspective yield on how
learning takes place
and on what is required to support it? In this chapter, I will try
to develop
such a perspective.
A conceptual perspective: theory and practice
There are many different kinds of learning theory. Each
emphasizes different
aspects of learning, and each is therefore useful for different
purposes. To
some extent these differences in emphasis refl ect a deliberate
focus on a slice
of the multidimensional problem of learning, and to some extent
they refl ect
more fundamental differences in assumptions about the nature
of knowledge,
knowing, and knowers, and consequently about what matters in
learning. (For
those who are interested, a number of such theories with a brief
description of
their focus are listed in a note at the end of this chapter.)
The kind of social theory of learning I propose is not a
replacement for other
theories of learning that address different aspects of the
problem. But it does
have its own set of assumptions and its own focus. Within this
context, it does

constitute a coherent level of analysis; it does yield a
conceptual framework from
which to derive a consistent set of general principles and
recommendations for
understanding and enabling learning.
My assumptions as to what matters about learning and as to the
nature of
knowledge, knowing, and knowers can be succinctly
summarized as follows.
I start with four premises:
We are social beings. Far from being trivially true, this fact is a
central •
aspect of learning.
Knowledge is a matter of competence with respect to valued
enterprises •
– such as singing in tune, discovering scientifi c facts, fi xing
machines,
writing poetry, being convivial, growing up as a boy or a girl,
and so forth.
Knowing is a matter of participating in the pursuit of such
enterprises, •
that is, of active engagement in the world.
Meaning – our ability to experience the world and our
engagement with •
it as meaningful – is ultimately what learning is to produce.
As a refl ection of these assumptions, the primary focus of this
theory is on
learning as social participation. Participation here refers not
just to local
events of engagement in certain activities with certain people,
but to a more
encompassing process of being active participants in the
practices of social

communities and constructing identities in relation to these
communities.
Participating in a playground clique or in a work team, for
instance, is both
A social theory of learning 211
a kind of action and a form of belonging. Such participation
shapes not only
what we do, but also who we are and how we interpret what we
do.
A social theory of learning must therefore integrate the
components necessary
to characterize social participation as a process of learning and
of knowing.
These components, shown in Figure 15.1, include the following:
meaning: • a way of talking about our (changing) ability –
individually and
collectively – to experience our life and the world as
meaningful;
practice: • a way of talking about the shared historical and
social resources,
frameworks, and perspectives that can sustain mutual
engagement in
action;
community: • a way of talking about the social confi gurations
in which
our enterprises are defi ned as worth pursuing and our
participation is
recognizable as competence;
identity: • a way of talking about how learning changes who we

are and creates
personal histories of becoming in the context of our
communities.
Clearly, these elements are deeply interconnected and mutually
defi ning.
In fact, looking at Figure 15.1, you could switch any of the four
peripheral
components with learning, place it in the center as the primary
focus, and the
fi gure would still make sense.
Therefore, when I use the concept of “community of practice”
in the title of
the book, I really use it as a point of entry into a broader
conceptual framework
Figure 15.1 Components of a social theory of learning: an initial
inventory.
212 Etienne Wenger
of which it is a constitutive element. The analytical power of
the concept lies
precisely in that it integrates the components of Figure 15.1
while referring
to a familiar experience.
Communities of practice are everywhere
We all belong to communities of practice. At home, at work, at
school, in our
hobbies – we belong to several communities of practice at any

given time. And
the communities of practice to which we belong change over the
course of our
lives. In fact, communities of practice are everywhere.
Families struggle to establish an habitable way of life. They
develop their
own practices, routines, rituals, artifacts, symbols, conventions,
stories, and
histories. Family members hate each other and they love each
other; they agree
and they disagree. They do what it takes to keep going. Even
when families
fall apart, members create ways of dealing with each other.
Surviving together
is an important enterprise, whether surviving consists of the
search for food
and shelter or of the quest for a viable identity.
Workers organize their lives with their immediate colleagues
and customers
to get their jobs done. In doing so, they develop or preserve a
sense of
themselves they can live with, have some fun, and fulfi ll the
requirements of
their employers and clients. No matter what their offi cial job
description may
be, they create a practice to do what needs to be done. Although
workers may be
contractually employed by a large institution, in day-to-day
practice they work
with – and, in a sense, for – a much smaller set of people and
communities.
Students go to school and, as they come together to deal in their
own fashion

with the agenda of the imposing institution and the unsettling
mysteries of
youth, communities of practice sprout everywhere – in the
classroom as well
as on the playground, offi cially or in the cracks. And in spite
of curriculum,
discipline, and exhortation, the learning that is most personally
transformative
turns out to be the learning that involves membership in these
communities
of practice.
In garages, bands rehearse the same songs for yet another
wedding gig.
In attics, ham radio enthusiasts become part of worldwide
clusters of com-
municators. In the back rooms of churches, recovering
alcoholics go to their
weekly meetings to fi nd the courage to remain sober. In
laboratories, scientists
correspond with colleagues, near and far, in order to advance
their inquiries.
Across a worldwide web of computers, people congregate in
virtual spaces and
develop shared ways of pursuing their common interests. In offi
ces, computer
users count on each other to cope with the intricacies of obscure
systems. In
neighborhoods, youths gang together to confi gure their life on
the street and
their sense of themselves.
Communities of practice are an integral part of our daily lives.
They are so
informal and so pervasive that they rarely come into explicit
focus, but for

the same reasons they are also quite familiar. Although the term
may be new,
the experience is not. Most communities of practice do not have
a name and
do not issue membership cards. Yet, if we care to consider our
own life from
that perspective for a moment, we can all construct a fairly
good picture of the
communities of practice we belong to now, those we belonged
to in the past,
and those we would like to belong to in the future. We also have
a fairly good
idea of who belongs to our communities of practice and why,
even though
membership is rarely made explicit on a roster or a checklist of
qualifying
criteria. Furthermore, we can probably distinguish a few
communities of
practice in which we are core members from a larger number of
communities
in which we have a more peripheral kind of membership.
In all these ways, the concept of community of practice is not
unfamiliar. By
exploring it more systematically, I mean only to sharpen it, to
make it more
useful as a thinking tool. Toward this end, its familiarity will
serve me well.
Articulating a familiar phenomenon is a chance to push our
intuitions: to

deepen and expand them, to examine and rethink them. The
perspective that
results is not foreign, yet it can shed new light on our world. In
this sense, the
concept of community of practice is neither new nor old. It has
both the eye-
opening character of novelty and the forgotten familiarity of
obviousness – but
perhaps that is the mark of our most useful insights.
Rethinking learning
Placing the focus on participation has broad implications for
what it takes to
understand and support learning:
For • individuals, it means that learning is an issue of engaging
in and
contributing to the practices of their communities.
For • communities, it means that learning is an issue of refi
ning their practice
and ensuring new generations of members.
For • organizations, it means that learning is an issue of
sustaining the
interconnected communities of practice through which an
organization
knows what it knows and thus becomes effective and valuable
as an
organization.
Learning in this sense is not a separate activity. It is not
something we do
when we do nothing else or stop doing when we do something
else. There are
times in our lives when learning is intensifi ed: when situations
shake our sense

of familiarity, when we are challenged beyond our ability to
respond, when
we wish to engage in new practices and seek to join new
communities. There
are also times when society explicitly places us in situations
where the issue
of learning becomes problematic and requires our focus: we
attend classes,
memorize, take exams, and receive a diploma. And there are
times when
learning gels: an infant utters a fi rst word, we have a sudden
insight when
someone’s remark provides a missing link, we are fi nally
recognized as a full
214 Etienne Wenger
member of a community. But situations that bring learning into
focus are not
necessarily those in which we learn most, or most deeply. The
events of learning
we can point to are perhaps more like volcanic eruptions whose
fi ery bursts
reveal for one dramatic moment the ongoing labor of the earth.
Learning is
something we can assume – whether we see it or not, whether
we like the way
it goes or not, whether what we are learning is to repeat the past
or to shake it
off. Even failing to learn what is expected in a given situation
usually involves
learning something else instead.

For many of us, the concept of learning immediately conjures
up images of
classrooms, training sessions, teachers, textbooks, homework,
and exercises. Yet
in our experience, learning is an integral part of our everyday
lives. It is part of
our participation in our communities and organizations. The
problem is not
that we do not know this, but rather that we do not have very
systematic ways
of talking about this familiar experience. Even though the topic
of Communities
of Practice covers mostly things that everybody knows in some
ways, having
a systematic vocabulary to talk about it does make a difference.
An adequate
vocabulary is important because the concepts we use to make
sense of the
world direct both our perception and our actions. We pay
attention to what
we expect to see, we hear what we can place in our
understanding, and we act
according to our worldviews.
Although learning can be assumed to take place, modern
societies have come
to see it as a topic of concern – in all sorts of ways and for a
host of different
reasons. We develop national curriculums, ambitious corporate
training
programs, complex schooling systems. We wish to cause
learning, to take
charge of it, direct it, accelerate it, demand it, or even simply
stop getting in
the way of it. In any case, we want to do something about it.
Therefore, our

perspectives on learning matter: what we think about learning
infl uences where
we recognize learning, as well as what we do when we decide
that we must do
something about it – as individuals, as communities, and as
organizations.
If we proceed without refl ecting on our fundamental
assumptions about the
nature of learning, we run an increasing risk that our
conceptions will have
misleading ramifi cations. In a world that is changing and
becoming more
complexly interconnected at an accelerating pace, concerns
about learning are
certainly justifi ed. But perhaps more than learning itself, it is
our conception
of learning that needs urgent attention when we choose to
meddle with it on
the scale on which we do today. Indeed, the more we concern
ourselves with
any kind of design, the more profound are the effects of our
discourses on
the topic we want to address. The farther you aim, the more an
initial error
matters. As we become more ambitious in attempts to organize
our lives and
our environment, the implications of our perspectives, theories,
and beliefs
extend further. As we take more responsibility for our future on
larger and
larger scales, it becomes more imperative that we refl ect on the
perspectives
that inform our enterprises. A key implication of our attempts to
organize
learning is that we must become refl ective with regard to our

own discourses of
learning and to their effects on the ways we design for learning.
By proposing
a framework that considers learning in social terms, I hope to
contribute
to this urgent need for reflection and rethinking.
The practicality of theory
A perspective is not a recipe; it does not tell you just what to
do. Rather, it
acts as a guide about what to pay attention to, what diffi culties
to expect, and
how to approach problems.
If we believe, for instance, that knowledge consists of pieces of
information •
explicitly stored in the brain, then it makes sense to package
this
information in well-designed units, to assemble prospective
recipients of
this information in a classroom where they are perfectly still
and isolated
from any distraction, and to deliver this information to them as
succinctly
and articulately as possible. From that perspective, what has
come to stand
for the epitome of a learning event makes sense: a teacher
lecturing a class,
whether in a school, in a corporate training center, or in the

back room
of a library. But if we believe that information stored in explicit
ways is
only a small part of knowing, and that knowing involves
primarily active
participation in social communities, then the traditional format
does
not look so productive. What does look promising are inventive
ways of
engaging students in meaningful practices, of providing access
to resources
that enhance their participation, of opening their horizons so
they can put
themselves on learning trajectories they can identify with, and
of involving
them in actions, discussions, and refl ections that make a
difference to the
communities that they value.
Similarly, if we believe that productive people in organizations
are the •
diligent implementers of organizational processes and that the
key to
organizational performance is therefore the defi nition of
increasingly more
effi cient and detailed processes by which people’s actions are
prescribed,
then it makes sense to engineer and re-engineer these processes
in abstract
ways and then roll them out for implementation. But if we
believe that
people in organizations contribute to organizational goals by
participating
inventively in practices that can never be fully captured by
institutionalized
processes, then we will minimize prescription, suspecting that
too much

of it discourages the very inventiveness that makes practices
effective. We
will have to make sure that our organizations are contexts
within which
the communities that develop these practices may prosper. We
will have
to value the work of community building and make sure that
participants
have access to the resources necessary to learn what they need
to learn
in order to take actions and make decisions that fully engage
their own
knowledgeability.
216 Etienne Wenger
If all this seems like common sense, then we must ask ourselves
why our
institutions so often seem not merely to fail to bring about these
outcomes
but to work against them with a relentless zeal. Of course, some
of the blame
can justifi ably be attributed to confl icts of interest, power
struggles, and
even human wickedness. But that is too simple an answer and
unnecessarily
pessimistic. We must also remember that our institutions are
designs and that
our designs are hostage to our understanding, perspectives, and
theories. In
this sense, our theories are very practical because they frame
not just the ways
we act, but also – and perhaps most importantly when design

involves social
systems – the ways we justify our actions to ourselves and to
each other. In an
institutional context, it is diffi cult to act without justifying
your actions in
the discourse of the institution.
A social theory of learning is therefore not exclusively an
academic enterprise.
While its perspective can indeed inform our academic
investigations, it is also
relevant to our daily actions, our policies, and the technical,
organizational,
and educational systems we design. A new conceptual
framework for thinking
about learning is thus of value not only to theorists but to all of
us – teachers,
students, parents, youths, spouses, health practitioners, patients,
managers,
workers, policy makers, citizens – who in one way or another
must take
steps to foster learning (our own and that of others) in our
relationships, our
communities, and our organizations. In this spirit, Communities
of Practice is
written with both the theoretician and the practitioner in mind.
Note
I am not claiming that a social perspective of the sort proposed
here says
everything there is to say about learning. It takes for granted the
biological,
neurophysiological, cultural, linguistic, and historical
developments that
have made our human experience possible. Nor do I make any

sweeping claim
that the assumptions that underlie my approach are incompatible
with those
of other theories. There is no room here to go into very much
detail, but for
contrast it is useful to mention the themes and pedagogical
focus of some other
theories in order to sketch the landscape in which this
perspective is situated.
Learning is a natural concern for students of neurological
functions.
Neurophysiological theories focus on the biological mechanisms
of •
learning. They are informative about physiological limits and
rhythms
and about issues of stimulation and optimization of memory
processes
(Edelman 1993; Sylwester 1995).
Learning has traditionally been the province of psychological
theories.
Behaviorist • theories focus on behavior modifi cation via
stimulus-response
pairs and selective reinforcement. Their pedagogical focus is on
control
and adaptive response. Because they completely ignore issues of
meaning,

their usefulness lies in cases where addressing issues of social
meaning
is made impossible or is not relevant, such as automatisms,
severe social
dysfunctionality, or animal training (Skinner 1974).
Cognitive • theories focus on internal cognitive structures and
view learning as
transformations in these cognitive structures. Their pedagogical
focus is on
the processing and transmission of information through
communication,
explanation, recombination, contrast, inference, and problem
solving.
They are useful for designing sequences of conceptual material
that build
upon existing information structures. (Anderson 1983; Wenger
1987;
Hutchins 1995).
Constructivist • theories focus on the processes by which
learners build their
own mental structures when interacting with an environment.
Their
pedagogical focus is task-oriented. They favor hands-on, self-
directed
activities oriented towards design and discovery. They are
useful for
structuring learning environments, such as simulated worlds, so
as to afford
the construction of certain conceptual structures through
engagement in
self-directed tasks (Piaget 1954; Papert 1980).
Social learning • theories take social interactions into account,
but still from
a primarily psychological perspective. They place the emphasis
on in-
terpersonal relations involving imitation and modeling, and thus

focus
on the study of cognitive processes by which observation can
become
a source of learning. They are useful for understanding the
detailed
information-processing mechanisms by which social
interactions affect
behavior (Bandura 1977).
Some theories are moving away from an exclusively
psychological approach,
but with a different focus from mine.
Activity • theories focus on the structure of activities as
historically con-
stituted entities. Their pedagogical focus is on bridging the gap
between
the historical state of an activity and the developmental stage of
a person
with respect to that activity – for instance, the gap between the
current
state of a language and a child’s ability to speak that language.
The purpose
is to defi ne a “zone of proximal development” in which
learners who
receive help can perform an activity they would not be able to
perform by
themselves (Vygotsky 1934; Wertsch 1985; Engeström 1987).
Socialization • theories focus on the acquisition of membership
by newcomers
within a functionalist framework where acquiring membership
is defi ned as
internalizing the norms of a social group (Parsons 1962). As I
argue, there is a
subtle difference between imitation or the internalization of
norms by indi-

viduals and the construction of identities within communities of
practice.
Organizational • theories concern themselves both with the
ways individuals
learn in organizational contexts and with the ways in which
organizations
218 Etienne Wenger
can be said to learn as organizations. Their pedagogical focus is
on
organizational systems, structures, and politics and on
institutional forms
of memory (Argyris and Schön 1978; Senge 1990; Brown 1991;
Brown and
Duguid 1991; Hock 1995; Leonard-Barton 1995; Nonaka and
Takeuchi
1995; Snyder 1996).
References
Anderson, J.R. (1983). The Architecture of Cognition.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Argyris, C. and Schön, D.A. (1978). Organizational Learning: A
Theory of Action Perspective.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Brown, J.S. (1991). Research that reinvents the corporation.
Harvard Business Review, Jan.–Feb.,

pp. 102–11.
Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. (1991). Organizational learning and
communities-of-practice:
Toward a unifi ed view of working, learning, and innovation.
Organization Science, 2(1):
pp. 40–57.
Edelman, G. (1993). Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of
the Mind. New York: Basic Books.
Engeström, Y. (1987): Learning by Expanding: An Activity-
Theoretical Approach to Developmental
Research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit.
Hock, D.W. (1995). The chaordic century: The rise of enabling
organizations. Governors
State University Consortium and The South Metropolitan
College/University Consortium,
University Park, IL.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Leonard-Barton, D. (1995). Wellsprings of Knowledge:
Building and Sustaining the Sources
of Innovation. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1995). The Knowledge-Creating
Company: How Japanese Companies
Create the Dynamics of Innovation. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms. New York: Basic Books.
Parsons, T. (1962). The Structure of Social Action. New York:
Free Press.
Piaget, J. (1954). The Construction of Reality in the Child. New

York: Basic Books.
Senge, P.M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice
of the Learning Organization.
New York: Doubleday.
Skinner, B.F. (1974). About Behaviorism. New York: Knopf.
Snyder, W. (1996). Organization, learning and performance: An
exploration of the linkages
between organization learning, knowledge, and performance.
Doctoral dissertation, University
of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Sylwester, R. (1995). A Celebration of Neurons: An Educator’s
Guide to the Human Brain. Alexandria,
VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1934). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Wenger, E. (1987). Artificial Intelligence and Tutoring
Systems: Computational and Cognitive
Approaches to the Communication of Knowledge. San
Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning,
Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Wertsch, J. (1985). Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.

2
3
THINKING ABOUT EDUCATION SERIES
FIFTH EDITION
Jonas F. Soltis, Editor
The revised and expanded Fifth Edition of this series builds on
the
strengths of the previous editions. Written in a clear and concise
style,
these books speak directly to preservice and in-service teachers.
Each
offers useful interpretive categories and thought-provoking
insights into
daily practice in schools. Numerous case studies provide a
needed bridge
between theory and practice. Basic philosophical perspectives
on teaching,
learning, curriculum, ethics, and the relation of school to
society are made
readily accessible to the reader.
PERSPECTIVES ON LEARNING
D. C. Phillips and Jonas F. Soltis
THE ETHICS OF TEACHING
Kenneth A. Strike and Jonas F. Soltis

CURRICULUM AND AIMS
Decker F. Walker and Jonas F. Soltis
SCHOOL AND SOCIETY
Walter Feinberg and Jonas F. Soltis
APPROACHES TO TEACHING
Gary D Fenstermacher and Jonas F. Soltis
4
THINKING ABOUT EDUCATION SERIES
5TH EDITION
5
PERSPECTIVES ON LEARNING
D. C. PHILLIPS
JONAS F. SOLTIS
Teachers College
Columbia University
New York and London
6

Published by Teachers College Press, 1234 Amsterdam Avenue,
New York, NY 10027
Copyright © 2009 by Teachers College, Columbia University
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or
any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission from the publisher
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phillips, D. C. (Denis Charles), 1938-
Perspectives on learning / D. C. Phillips, Jonas F. Soltis. — 5th
ed.
p. cm. — (Thinking about education series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-8077-4983-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Learning—
Philosophy. I. Soltis, Jonas F. II.
Title.
LB1060.P48 2009
370.15’23--dc22
2009006147
ISBN: 978-0-8077-4983-8 (paper)
e-ISBN: 978-0-8077-7120-4
7
Contents

Acknowledgments
A Note to the Instructor
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
Learning
The Teacher’s Responsibility
The Variety of Theories
An Objection: We Don’t Need Theories, Just Common Sense
The Plan of the Book
Chapter 2
CLASSICAL THEORIES
Plato’s Theory of Learning
Case One
The Lockean Atomistic Model
Case Two
A Critique
Case Three
Chapter 3
BEHAVIORISM

Classical Conditioning
Operant Conditioning
Case One
B. F. Skinner
Strengths and Weaknesses
8
Case Two
Chapter 4
PROBLEM SOLVING, INSIGHT, AND ACTIVITY
The Gestalt Approach
Case One
The Inquiring Organism
The Mind of the Learner
Chapter 5
PIAGETIAN STRUCTURES AND PSYCHOLOGICAL
CONSTRUCTIVISM
The Development of Cognitive Structures
The Principles of Construction
Case One

Some Critical Issues
Guidelines for Educators
Constructivist Approaches to Learning After Piaget
Chapter 6
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF LEARNING
Social Influences on the “Piagetian Child”
John Dewey
Case One
Vygotsky and Others
Case Two
Case Three
Situated Cognition and Legitimate Peripheral Participation in
Communities of Practice
Culture and Learning
Chapter 7
COGNITIVE STRUCTURES AND DISCIPLINARY
STRUCTURES
Maps and Organizers
An Exercise
9

The Structure of Disciplines
Bruner, Schwab, and Hirst
An Evaluation
Chapter 8
TRANSFER OF LEARNING
Case One
Related Notions: Mental and Formal Discipline
Case Two
Further Clarifications and Examples
Case Three
Case Four: An Early Empirical Study
Where Do We Stand Today?
Chapter 9
THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE APPROACH
Models: Pros and Cons
The Heuristic Value for Researchers
The Heuristic Value for Teachers
Some Deficiencies of the Computer Model

Understanding, Meaning, and the “Chinese Room”
An Exercise
Case One: Benny’s Mathematics
Plato and the Mind
Chapter 10
ARGUMENTS AND ISSUES
The Relation of Learning Theory to Teaching
Different Kinds of Learning?
A Starting Place for Learning
Learning and Behavior Change
The Scientific Status of Gestalt and Behaviorist Theories
10
Different Teaching-Learning Strategies
Teaching, Learning, and Stages of Development
Learning to Read
Learning Facts and Structures
Learning Responsibility

Learning Theory and Artificial Intelligence
Learning to Balance Chemical Equations
The Evaluation of Verbal and Skill Learning
Learning the Meaning of Adding
Learning Shakespeare
Culture and Learning
Individualized Learning
A Problem with Multiple Theories of Learning
References, Notes, and Further Reading
Annotated Bibliography
11
Acknowledgments
As is the case with all books, this one owes much to those who
have
played a part in its production. Lee Shulman gave
encouragement and
agreed to use a draft of the first edition of the text in a course
co-taught at
Stanford with Denis Phillips. We are especially indebted to the
students in
that course for their constructive criticisms. Professor James
Marshall of

the University of Auckland carefully read and reacted to several
draft
chapters. Valerie Phillips and Frances Simon provided essential
and much
appreciated word-processing skills. For general research
assistance that
included copyediting, development of cases, and offering useful
suggestions, we thank Karl Hostetler. For the second edition,
we were
guided by several thoughtful reviews of the earlier volume, and
we were
especially indebted to Kenneth Howe and Robert Floden. The
substantial
expansion of the discussion of social aspects of learning in the
third edition
owes much to what was learned from the “Symbolic Systems
Seminar in
Education” at Stanford over a period of about five years, and
Rich
Shavelson discussed some issues relevant to the revisions for
the fourth
and fifth editions. Finally, we thank the able and cooperative
staff of TC
Press for shepherding us through the various editions.
12
A Note to the Instructor
This book is designed to be used in the education of teachers.
We did not
write for “teachers in training” because we believe teachers
should be
educated rather than trained. We invite the users of the book to

think with
us as colleagues about the complexities of human learning.
The book is organized so that it can be used in a number of
ways to
suit the purposes and style of the instructor. It can be used
singularly as the
primary text for a full course on its topic, as supplemental
reading, or as a
source for cases and dialogues to stimulate class discussions.
If this book is used as a text in a full course, a number of
pedagogical
options are available:
1. The first nine chapters can be treated as you would treat any
text, and
then the arguments and issues in Chapter 10 can be used to
provide
materials for class discussions for the remainder of the term.
From
our experience, a case or a dialogue can easily produce a good
discussion that lasts thirty or more minutes.
2. We have found that doing a chapter and then spending one or
two
sessions discussing the cases and related dialogues is a very
effective
way to mix the theoretical with the practical. At the end of each
of the
first nine chapters and in Table 1 in Chapter 10 we have offered
suggestions for additional cases, dialogues, and issues to be
discussed
as you proceed.
3. To either of the above approaches could be added your own

or class-
invented dialogues, debates, and puzzles that apply theory to
practice
or raise issues of personal concern.
If you have not taught using the case method before, the
following
suggestions may be of some help:
1. It is important to establish a good group climate for
discussion in
which individuals feel free to express their views openly
without fear
of ridicule and also feel free to challenge the honest views of
others
with reasonable arguments and genuine alternatives.
13
2. Good group discussions are facilitated by asking students to
read
cases and sketch their answers to case problems before class so
a
discussion can start with some forethought and direction.
3. Pedagogically, as a discussion leader it is useful to
summarize along
the way, to help students see the ideas at issue, and to bring in
relevant theoretical knowledge to guide discussions to some
reason
able conclusion, however firm or tentative.
4. And remember, students can learn worthwhile things even
when their

instructor is not talking.
We trust you will find this book to be a versatile pedagogical
tool,
useful in getting students not only to learn about learning
theories but also
to think with and about them as they make practical applications
and raise
basic issues.
14
Chapter 1
15
Introduction
This is a book about theories of learning. In it we want to get
you to think
about learning—how it happens, and what it is. Obviously, as a
teacher,
your job is or will be to help others learn. You may already
have some
good ideas about learning—after all, you have been doing it
yourself for
some time. Or you may feel there is not much for you to think
about
regarding learning since modern learning theorists surely must
know all
there is to know about it by now. Perhaps all you need to do is
read about

their theories and heed what they say when you teach or design
curricula.
Unfortunately, that is not so easy to do. Theorists do not all
agree about
what learning is or how it happens. Psychologists,
anthropologists,
linguists, neurophysiologists, philosophers, and others are still
trying to
understand how people learn. For there are great complexities—
there seem
to be different types of learning, some involving mental events
such as
remembering, analyzing, discriminating, and so forth, and some
others that
involve bodily movements and their coordination, such as when
you learn
to pitch a baseball. Certainly, theorists and researchers have
some good
ideas that will help you think about learning, and we will deal
with many
of them in this book. But ultimately, it is you who will have to
make the
best sense you can of how to foster various types of human
learning in
order to become a thoughtful and effective educator.
Learning
To get you into the right frame of mind to think about learning
and to help
you to see what this book is about, imagine that several of your
friends
were to contact you and ask a favor. One wants to learn to keep
off junk
food and seeks your advice and encouragement; the second is
trying to

learn Spanish vocabulary and asks you to act as tutor; the third
has heard
you debate in public, admires your skill, and wants your help in
learning
how to do it for herself; and the fourth friend is learning
physics and is
stuck on Einstein’s theory, and he asks you to explain it to him.
Being
generous in nature, and also a very talented person, you agree to
help all of
them!
Clearly, in all four cases you would be assisting a person to
learn. But
it is also clear that the types of learning involved are quite
different. In the
first case you would be helping someone to break a habit
(dependence
16
upon junk food no doubt is partly psychological, but also partly
physiological, so what we have here is a learning assignment
that involves
the mental and the physical realms); in the second you would be
helping a
person commit information to memory; in the third case you
would be
teaching your friend a new and complex skill (again this
involves the
mental/psychological realm and the physical/motor realm); and
your fourth
friend needs to be taught something quite abstract (and taught
so that he

achieves that mysterious state we call “understanding”). No
doubt you
would use different teaching strategies: the method you use to
teach your
friend to avoid junk food would not work with the learning of
debating
skills. And rote memorization, which works in the case of
foreign words,
is not likely to succeed with learning Einstein’s theory. Your
friend could
memorize it, certainly, but this will not necessarily enable him
to
understand or apply it intelligently, and that presumably is what
he is after.
The Teacher’s Responsibility
How would you go about selecting a suitable teaching strategy
in each
case? How would you know that it was suitable? If one of your
friends
failed to learn, would you blame yourself for selecting a poor
method?
Teachers face these issues all the time, but with added
complexity thrown
in. They are not usually helping one person at a time, but are
trying to
promote learning in a class of perhaps thirty or more students.
What
teaching method would you use if all four of your friends turned
up at one
time? And how convinced are you that there is a single method
or
approach that would work adequately in all four cases?
Furthermore, you
are safe in assuming that your friends want to learn the things

they have
sought your help with, but this is not always a safe assumption
to make in
a classroom. Promotion of learning is not unidimensional—the
importance
of motivating students to learn cannot be emphasized enough;
also
important is catering for students who have different learning
abilities and
who cover the work at different rates, deciding what content to
teach and
what activities to organize in order to facilitate this learning,
maintaining
discipline, and socializing students to become functioning
members of
society—all these are grist to the teacher’s mill. Thus, anything
you learn
will have to be balanced against these other things; a teacher is
constantly
making difficult “judgment calls.”
This book does not cover all the complexities of a teacher’s life
in the
classroom—it is a book about theories of learning. In it we can
only hope
to stimulate you to think about learning, about the forms it
takes, and about
what you, as a teacher, might do to promote it in students. We
cannot
17
make you a good teacher. You have to do that for yourself. But
thinking

seriously about theories of learning should help.
The Variety of Theories
At this point you may have become aware of the suspicious fact
that we
have been using a key word in the plural: “theories” of learning.
Using the
plural here is in marked contrast with the mainstream tendency
over the
course of Western thought to treat the learning of propositions
(such things
as “Sydney is the oldest and largest city in Australia”) as the
basic type of
learning that should be the starting point for a theory that will
apply to all
cases of learning. In common with other philosophers, we reject
this
simplifying assumption.
So, then, why is there more than one theory in this area? There
are
several answers. In the first place, as we have already
illustrated, there is
more than one type of learning. It is not clear whether a theory
that
explains how habits are formed, or how facts are memorized,
will also
explain how a learner comes to understand a complex and
abstract piece of
science. (In the field of medicine, the “germ theory of disease”
does not
explain genetic defects—different types of phenomena require
different
explanations.) Of course, some researchers who accept the
mainstream

assumption mentioned above are trying to develop a single
comprehensive
learning theory; indeed, scientists in many fields are driven to
integrate
knowledge in this way, for if they are successful the results give
a great
deal of intellectual satisfaction and solve a number of diverse
problems.
But so far, in the field of learning, no such attempt has been a
resounding
success. Indeed, some theorists believe the mind is “modular,”
composed
of a number of differently functioning systems that have been
cobbled
together in the course of evolution; others insist that the types
of learning
are so different that it is unreasonable to expect that a single
theory could
cover them all.
To help you see what we mean, consider some of the things you
have
learned in your life so far—and then think about how you
learned them.
For instance, most of us have learned directly from experience
without
instruction, study, or practice that ice is cold, flames are hot,
water is wet,
and knives can cut. However, when we learned the alphabet and
how to
count to ten, almost certainly we all required a little initial
supervised
instruction and needed to do some sing-song practicing. But it
would be
hard to think of learning to play chess or to drive a car without
undergoing

sustained instruction and without focusing one’s mental efforts
on the
18
tasks embodied in the mastery of such things.
What do these examples suggest? First, there seem to be
different sorts
of learning, some simple and some complex, some involving the
acquisition of knowledge and others involving the mastery of
skills and the
formation of dispositions. Second, while some things can be
learned
without a teacher, there are many situations in which the help of
a teacher
is vital for many learners.
There also is a possibility that different theories of learning
have
resulted from various investigators approaching the
phenomenon of
learning from different directions and armed with different
initial
“hunches.” You may recall the old Indian folk tale about the
blind men
who were given an elephant to examine. The man who felt the
tail got
quite a different impression of the beast than the man who felt
one of the
legs, while the man who started with the trunk reached yet
another
startling conclusion. So it is in all scientific enquiries—the
initial ideas or

hypotheses the investigator forms may color his or her later
conclusions.
Consider the following possibilities: If one were to focus on
how a
child learns that flames are hot and take this to be a typical case
of
learning, a particular (and probably narrow) experiential
learning theory
most likely would result. But such a theory probably would be
different
from one that would result from starting with a different case—
say, how a
child learns to count to ten. Neither of these theories, however,
would be
likely to be formulated by someone who had selected as a
typical case of
learning more complicated things like how people learn to drive
a car or
how high school students learn history. Thus, a psychologist or
educational
researcher who starts with the insight that humans are part-and-
parcel of
the animal kingdom may try to explain human learning in the
same way
that animal learning is explained (say, the learning processes in
pigeons or
rats). On the other hand, a researcher who regards the human
brain as a
type of computer, differing from the popular brands largely in
that it is
made of protoplasm instead of silicon chips, may try to explain
as much
learning as possible in data-processing terms.
It would be a mistake to think that only researchers hold such

divergent, rival views. Teachers, too, vary a great deal in the
underlying
images they have of the nature of their students. Some regard
all members
of their school classes as being potentially equal in ability to
learn, while
others regard the students as inherently quite different; some
regard the
school as having great power to shape the minds of the students,
while
19
others regard it as being marginally influential at best; some see
the
students as unwilling and rebellious, while others see them as
eager to
learn and inclined to behave if they are treated properly.
Whatever your view on these matters, as a professional charged
with
fostering the intellectual development of your students, you
should be
acquainted with the variety of theories that have been put
forward. Your
eyes will be opened to new possibilities, and to facets of your
students that
you might otherwise not notice. Just as travel broadens the
mind, so does
acquaintance with rival viewpoints. You should reflect on the
various
theories of learning, and think about the implications that they
have for
your work in the classroom. The following chapters should help

you set
out on this professional journey.
An Objection: We Don’t Need Theories, Just Common Sense
Research in education and the social sciences is sometimes
criticized on
the ground that it is futile, for it only comes up with “findings”
that are so
obvious that anyone with common sense knew these things
before the
research was done. This attitude is particularly common in the
realm of
teaching; there is nothing mysterious or complex here, for the
principles
are pretty obvious to anyone who reflects for just a few
moments—a book
like Perspectives on Learning is quite unnecessary!
Fortunately for us, as authors, there is a decisive two-pronged
answer
to this. First, there actually has been some research on what
people regard
as “obvious.”1 Several decades ago a student of the great
educational
psychologist Nathaniel Gage drew up two lists of supposed
“findings” of
social science research; the second list contained the opposites
of the items
on the first list. (List one might have items like “teenage girls
are better at
Z than boys,” while the second list would have “teenage girls
are not as
good as boys at Z.”) A large number of laypeople were shown
one or the
other of the lists (nobody, of course, was shown both lists), and

asked to
judge whether or not each of the reported “findings” was so
obvious that
the research should not have been done. In many cases, both of
the
contradictory findings were judged to be so obvious that the
result was
commonsensical! The moral here, of course, is that we need to
be cautious
about what we judge to be commonsense knowledge. (And
recall that our
ancestors thought it was commonsense that the world was flat,
and that the
cure for many diseases—possibly including anemia—was to
“bleed” the
patient.)
The second point in the answer to the objection that all we need
to
20
foster learning is common sense is that there is often bias in the
selection
of examples; clearly there are some occasions when research
confirms the
“obvious,” but we should not overemphasize these and ignore
the many
important cases where the answer to the question is not obvious
at all. (Nor
should we downplay the importance of actually confirming the
obvious!)
Is it obvious, before research, which method of teaching reading
—“phonics” or “whole language”—is most effective and what

the
unintended harmful consequences of each might be? Is it
obvious, in
teaching a new mathematics skill, whether or not “massed
practice” is
superior to “distributed practice” (that is, giving a large number
of practice
exercises in a clump, or spreading the practice out over a
somewhat
extended time frame)? Is it obvious, before research, what the
limitations
to human memory are? If gender differences are found in some
educational performance, is it obvious before research whether
the
difference is due to biological/developmental or sociocultural
factors?
The Plan of the Book
We will start with a consideration of two classical theories of
learning that
may appear simple and a little strange to modern eyes. But we
will try to
show that Plato’s “recollection” theory and Locke’s “blank
tablet” theory
offer some interesting ways to think about learning and set
some problems
and issues with which modern theories are still trying to deal.
Then we will look at behaviorism, a theory of learning that
dominated
the field of psychology for a large part of the twentieth century.
The
behaviorist takes learning to be the result of actions of the
environment on
the learner. For instance, we learn that a lightning flash is soon

followed
by thunder and so we also may learn to cover our ears whenever
we see
lightning. Sometimes we find our environment and our actions
in it to be
rewarding and so we learn to repeat actions that generally result
in
something nice happening to us. People who are good at ping-
pong and
frequently win tend to play more often than those who lose
every match.
According to this behaviorist theory, we learn to act in
acceptable ways by
being praised when we do good things and by praise being
withheld when
we do not.
The behaviorist theory has been challenged by a number of
other
theories and we shall consider the major challengers in
subsequent
chapters. Gestalt theory views learning as a process involving
the attempt
to think things out and then having “it all come together”
suddenly in the
mind. Sometimes it is jokingly referred to as the “Aha!” or “Got
it!” theory
21
of learning or, more seriously, the “insight” theory. It is like
poring over
your class notes before an exam and finally coming to see how
the ideas

dealt with relate to one another. To explain this mental
phenomenon, the
Gestalt psychologists looked beyond behavior and the
environment, and
they tried to throw light on learning by investigating tendencies
of the
mind to pattern and structure experience.
Beginning with a hunch about the importance of firsthand
experience
to learning, John Dewey developed a “problem solving” theory
of learning
whose basic premise was that learning happens as a result of our
“doing”
and “experiencing” things in the world as we successfully solve
real
problems that are genuinely meaningful to us. School learning
then, he
argued, must be based on meaningful student experiences and
genuine
student problem solving. He believed that textbook problems
most often
were not real problems to students and that school learning
should be an
experientially active, not a passive, affair.
Taking a biological approach, Piaget viewed learning as an
adaptive
function of an organism. By means of learning, an organism
develops
“schemes” for dealing with and understanding its environment.
For Piaget,
learning is the individual’s construction and modification of
structures for
dealing successfully with the world. He also claimed that there
are stages

of intellectual development that all human beings pass through
as they
learn certain universal schemes for structuring the world (like
the concepts
of number, cause, time, and space) and as they learn certain
aspects of
logical reasoning. Piaget’s ideas have inspired many subsequent
theorists
of learning, including the so-called radical constructivists.
A defect in many of the preceding theories is that they consider
learning to be an individual phenomenon—the learner is
depicted as a lone
inquirer. In fact, of course, learners are embedded in a social
network;
teachers, parents, siblings, and peers, not to mention characters
on TV and
in films, all influence what each of us will learn. Chapter 6
discusses some
basic ideas related to this theme of the social dimension of
learning from
Dewey, Vygotsky, and Bandura down to the advocates of
“situated
learning” and participation in communities of practice. Chapter
7 returns
to the notion of “structure,” this time with regard to the subject
matter to
be learned. Since subjects are organized bodies of knowledge, it
might
help learners if they could see or construct for themselves the
basic outline
or structure of the subject they are studying. Dewey, Bruner,
Schwab, and
Hirst offer some insights into this process. One of the
justifications for
teaching the structure of a subject is that this facilitates using

the material
22
in new contexts—and this is a segue to the age-old issue of
transfer of
learning. For literally thousands of years it has been held that a
major aim
of education is to train the mind so that the skills acquired and
strengthened in one context can be applied to solving novel
problems in
other domains. The form this doctrine has taken over the
centuries, and
how it fares in the light of contemporary research, is the topic
of Chapter
8.
Finally, in Chapter 9, we shall look at an emerging theory of
learning
that comes out of our contemporary technological revolution in
computing
and artificial intelligence. This approach to learning theory has
been called
various things but perhaps the best catch-all term for it is the
“cognitive
science” approach. As we think about learning from this point
of view we
will have to consider to what extent computers are modeled on
human
minds and to what extent we can understand minds and learning
by
treating them as “computerlike.” There may be as many puzzles
as there
are answers and insights offered by this emerging view, but we

know that
it is one that has stimulated much contemporary thinking about
learning
and is sure to be of import to educators in the future.
The last chapter in this book, Chapter 10, is somewhat different
from
the others. It is one we hope you will refer to and use as you go
through
the book itself because it is designed to stimulate further
thought about the
theories, problems, and issues raised in the book. We call this
last chapter
“Arguments and Issues.” In it there are eighteen vignettes—
concrete cases
in the form of dialogues, disputes, arguments, and debates—that
raise
interesting and important issues about learning, and bring
theory closer to
practice. Whether you refer to some of the cases in Chapter 10
as you go
along, or save them for consideration at the end, we are sure
you will find
that class discussions of these examples will force even deeper
thinking
about learning and educating. For those who wish to sample
some cases
relevant to this first chapter before going on to Chapter 2, we
recommend
“The Relation of Learning Theory to Teaching” and “Different
Kinds of
Learning?” in Chapter 10. The book ends with references and
additional
recommendations for further reading that will take you beyond
our
introductory treatment of theories of learning and keep you

thinking about
them as you become a professional educator.
23
Chapter 2
24
Classical Theories
Interest in teaching and learning is not new; it probably
antedates recorded
history. The New Testament paints a picture of Jesus as a
dedicated
teacher, consistently using stories and examples that would
communicate
his ideas in a memorable way to his audiences. A few years
earlier, Rabbi
Hillel also won fame as a teacher. Going back further, the
ancient Greek
philosopher Plato (428?–347 B.C.E.) expounded his ideas in
lively
dialogues, and his Academy was famous as a teaching
institution. Plato,
too, was concerned to use examples and stories that would make
an
impact. All this, of course, reflects the unsurprising insight that
it is most
effective to present material in a way that is both interesting
and
understandable to those who are to learn it.

But there is a problem here, and it is a tribute to Plato’s genius
that he
was able to perceive it. How is it that a learner is able to
understand
something new? Consider a person who was absolutely and
completely
ignorant; how could this person understand, and learn,
something that was
totally incomprehensible? (Could a computer, with completely
empty data
banks and no internal program, acquire a piece of factual
information
without any prior preparation?) Plato had one of the characters
in his
dialogue Meno raise the issue in this way:
I know, Meno, what you mean … you argue that a man cannot
inquire either about that
which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he
knows, he has no need to
inquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very
subject about which he is to
inquire.1
This problem, in one form or another, continues to plague
researchers
to the present day.
One answer that occurs after a little reflection is that learning
depends
upon the student having some prior knowledge or experience. A
child who
has not yet learned a language, and a computer that has not yet
been
programmed, cannot have anything “explained” to them. People

listening
to Plato or Hillel or Jesus would not be able to learn if they did
not have
enough experience to comprehend the parable being presented.
A student
who does not know that light has a velocity, and who does not
have some
understanding of the concepts of mass and energy, could not
learn
Einstein’s theory (at least in the sense of understanding it and
its
25
implications).
Further reflection shows that, as it stands, this solution is no
solution at
all—at best it pushes the problem one stage back. For where did
this
previous knowledge come from? How was it learned?
Presumably it was
able to be learned because something prior to it was known.
But, in turn,
how was this learned? Here we are in the grip of an infinite
regress—an
uncomfortable situation to be in. Learning is possible only if
some prior
things are known, and these prior things could have been
learned only if
something prior to them had been learned, and so on!
Plato’s Theory of Learning

The specifics of Plato’s own solution to this problem seem
rather fanciful
to the modern reader, but the principle he adopted to escape
from the
infinite regress is one that is still in use: knowledge is innate, it
is in place
in the mind at birth. At the end of his famous work, The
Republic, Plato
included a myth describing the adventures of a young soldier,
Er, who
appeared to have been slain in battle, but who revived nearly
two weeks
later and was able to describe what had happened to his soul
during the
time he seemed to be dead. Er, together with the souls of those
who
actually had died, was able to gaze on the realm of everlasting
reality, and
thus come to learn the truth. Er also witnessed how souls picked
new lives,
and he saw that just before they were reborn the souls camped
overnight
on the banks of the Forgetful River. They were forced to drink
from the
river, where some drank more than their fair portion; by the
middle of the
night all souls had forgotten all that they had seen in heaven,
and then they
were swept away to their new lives on Earth. The strong
implication is that
those who drank too fully would not be able, in the new life, to
remember
anything about reality, and these individuals would remain
ignorant. Those
who had drunk only the minimum, however, could with great
effort—and

with the prompting of education on Earth—recall the insights
into reality
their souls had received. These latter would be the people who,
on Earth,
would be regarded as having learned. In other words, for Plato
learning
was a process of recalling what the soul had already seen and
absorbed; his
theory (if we can call it that) even explains why it is that some
people can
learn more, or can learn more readily, than others. For Plato,
teaching is
simply the helping of this remembering process.
In the other dialogue we have mentioned, Meno, there is a
famous
passage in which a slave boy—who has never had any geometry
lessons—
is led by a series of questions to invent for himself a theorem
related to
26
that of Pythagoras, which states that the square of the
hypotenuse of a right
triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two
sides. The point
is the same as in “The Myth of Er”; the slave boy apparently has
learned
something of which he was previously totally ignorant, but in
fact it would
be impossible for him to do so, and really what has happened is
that he has
recalled something that was in his soul (or, if you would prefer,

in his
mind) all the time. According to Plato, if one does not
previously know
something, one cannot learn it now! In later chapters of this
book we will
see how twentieth-century researchers faced up to Plato’s
problem—their
solutions are no less wonderful.
There is another important facet to Plato’s view of learning, one
which
some—but not all—recent writers have explicitly opposed. In an
important
respect Plato regarded learning as a rather passive process in
which
impressions are made upon the receptive soul or mind. After all,
Er learned
by observing the realities in heaven. Plato tells another story,
“The Simile
of the Cave,” about some prisoners chained in a cave so that
they can look
only at the wall furthest away from the entrance. Outside the
cave people
pass by, carrying various objects held high above their heads,
but the
prisoners can only see the shadows of the objects on the wall.
What they
learn in their world of the cave is about these shadows, which
they mistake
for knowledge of reality. Only if they are released and allowed
to turn
around will they come to see reality and acquire (learn) real
knowledge.
Plato was pointing out that many people who think they are
knowledgeable actually are quite mistaken. They take
appearance to be

reality.
According to this simile, then, teaching is the process of
releasing
people from the chains of ignorance; but it is also clear that
learning is
passive, that it is a matter of “turning” and allowing the mind to
see
clearly. In other places Plato spelled out more clearly what is
involved
here, and it is obvious that he valued the place of abstract
reasoning; the
person who had been trained to reason clearly (logically and
mathematically) would be more likely to escape from the cave
of
ignorance and see the truth by using his mind. But nevertheless
seeing the
truth was a kind of seeing. (And, of course, we still say “I see
it” when we
have learned something!) These points emerge in the following
portion of
Plato’s dialogue:
We must reject the conception of education professed by those
who say that they can put
into the mind knowledge that was not there before—rather as if
they could put sight into
blind eyes.
27
It is a claim that is certainly made.
But our argument indicates that this capacity is innate in each

man’s mind, and that
the faculty by which he learns is like an eye which cannot be
turned from darkness to light
unless the whole body is turned; in the same way the mind as a
whole must be turned
away from the world of change until it can bear to look straight
at reality…. Isn’t that so?
Yes.
Then this business of turning the mind around might be made a
matter of professional
skill, which would effect the conversion as easily and
effectively as possible. It would not
be concerned to implant sight, but to ensure that someone who
had it already was turned
in the right direction and looking the right way.2
Case One
To help you think about the points Plato is making, imagine this
teacher–
pupil interaction:
P. Mrs. Smith, I can’t figure out the answer to this math puzzle.
T: Which one, Henry?
P: The one that says, If you know that there are six grapes and
two plums
for each person sitting at a table and that there is a total of
twenty-four
pieces of fruit on the table, then you should know how many
people are
seated at the table … but I don’t.

T Sure you do. Think a minute. Could there be only one person?
P: No.
T: Why?
P: Because one person would get only six grapes plus two plums
and that’s
eight pieces of fruit and there are more than that.
T: How many more?
P: Sixteen.
T: And if each person gets eight pieces, how many more people
could
there be?
P: Two! So there must be three people seated at the table!
T: See, I told you that you knew the answer. You just needed to
get
yourself in a position to see it.
Did the teacher tell or explain anything to the pupil? Did the
teacher
28
teach? Did the pupil learn something? What? Do you think this
is an
example of Plato’s theory of learning? Why or why not? If you

think about
this case, and perhaps discuss it with others, we think you will
see why
Plato’s myths and similes have stimulated the imagination of his
readers
for more than two thousand years.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the general answer Plato gave to
the
question “How is learning possible?” is not acceptable. If
people can learn
only if they have previous knowledge, then it is no solution to
say that the
soul acquired this previous knowledge sometime earlier by
means of a
process of observation. For how could the soul learn by
observing unless it
already knew something? (Imagine a computer wired to a TV
camera—a
setup found in modern robots; the camera may “observe” the
surroundings
but unless the computer is programmed no information will be
stored.) It is
apparent that we are still in the grip of the infinite regress:
Where did the
original knowledge (or program) come from?
The Lockean Atomistic Model
A major attempt to answer this question was made nearly two
thousand
years after Plato. At the end of the seventeenth century the
British
philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) developed a theory of
learning that
was to profoundly influence the early development of modern

psychology,
as well as shape educational practice down to the present day.
Locke
shared some of Plato’s assumptions but disagreed with him
about others.
Locke could not accept that knowledge was innate; in his view
the infant
came into the world with a mind that was completely devoid of
content—it
was like an “empty cabinet,” a “blank tablet,” or a “tabula
rasa.” On the
other hand, Locke seems to have realized that something had to
be present
for the child to be able to learn.
Modern technology gives us an advantage that Locke did not
have;
there is a familiar and simple example that now can be used to
illustrate
the principles he had in mind. These days just about all of us
have
purchased a hand-held electronic calculator. It comes from the
factory
nicely packaged; when it is turned on it lights up but nothing
else happens,
for it has no contents in its memory. It is exactly analogous to
Locke’s
newborn baby—it is a “blank slate.” But lying dormant within
the
calculator are various powers or abilities or capacities to
perform
operations. The device lies ready to perform multiplications and
additions,
calculate percentages and square roots, commit numbers to
memory, and
so on. These powers or capacities have been wired in by the

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