Learning is about trust, not truth
What does it mean to trust?
Because learning fundamentally relies upon it.
To learn from an experience, we have to trust the evidence of our senses. To learn from a person, we have to trust them enough to believe that what they’re sharing is knowledge. We have to feel their values align with ours in that moment.
Trust is a proxy for certainty in the absence of incontrovertible evidence. If someone makes a claim and I don’t (yet) know whether it’s true, I need to decide whether I trust the claimant enough to accept their claim.
Education systems provide a shortcut to making these decisions. The institution and its agents have done the work of evaluating information sources for us and curating them to provide an approved learning menu. If we successfully demonstrate our ability to learn from that menu, the institution will certify us too: our work is evaluated, we are issued with credentials backed by the authority of the institution.
I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that that trust is eroding, and that other kinds of trust are growing.
“Industry” (that old monolith) has long doubted the ability of tertiary educators to provide graduates who are ready to fuel its workforce.
The early stages of my research suggest that tremendous numbers of adults distrust the education system and are reticent to engage in learning later in life because of this. For those who “failed” (or were failed by) formal education, school is a place that does not value their worth; a place whose values are not theirs.
But even those who succeeded cannot trust in their education any more. Things they learned in school are quickly superseded, revealed as false or insufficient, or simply obviously not the only answer there is.
Remember that trust in someone requires some alignment of values. It involves a reliquishing of control to someone (or something) that we are confident will act in our interests. But why would we, if we don’t need school to learn and achieve our goals? Why would we, if school doesn’t seem to have our interests at heart?
Of course, learning outside of school still requires us to relinquish control. All learning means acknowledging there is something we don’t yet know.
Learning outside of education systems means finding our own paths to trust. We must find information, evaluate its sources, and determine whether and how to echo that information in our own practice, including the claims we make to others.
This is effortful, it’s difficult, and in practice, it’s rarely done with rigour. Everyday life information seeking practices, like internet searches and personal enquiries, usually involve finding information that is “good enough” for the purposes of the seeker. We usually want it fast, straightforward and easy to operationalise.
Malcolm Knowles might have been overly generous when he came up with those adult learning principles. Sure, we want practical, personally-relevant, goal-focused learning opportunities. We also prefer efficiency over veracity, which isn’t such a warm and fuzzy prospect for adult educators trying to teach hard lessons.
I often say that belief isn’t about what is true, but about what is useful. What we can do something with; what we can live by. In what is very clearly now a post-truth time, we can see this clearer than ever. Claims garner support not because they have impartial evidence to back them up, but because they are made by people who seem partial to our interests.
Perhaps, then, this is something those of us in higher education need to be more honest with ourselves about. We (HE folks) have erected great infrastructures for gathering evidence and presenting it “impartially”. We champion validity, reliability, objectivity. But our system is built on a foundation of judging (assessing) students according to our values — not theirs. These judgements are not impartial. There is no such thing as elimination of bias, because evaluations are bias. Every criterion used to make a judgement is a preference, a value claim about what is good (and what, in its negative space, is bad).
What claim do we have to trust?