Abstract
In this chapter I argue that ‘meeting the basic learning needs of all throughout life’ is a challenge significantly more comprehensive and complex than that of ‘providing basic education for all.’ The original meaning of the verb ‘to provide’ (pro videre) is ‘to foresee.’ In conjunction with the word ‘education’ it is commonly interpreted as ‘to furnish,’ ‘to supply,’ or ‘to deliver.’ The notion of delivery is tied in with a paradigm that is worth challenging, namely the idea that learning consists of acquiring pieces of information or knowledge and that, in order for that to happen, such information should be delivered to the learner. In this view, information and knowledge are essentially conceived of as commodities. Similarly, the learner is seen as a recipient of information and of prompts to process information, rather than as a participant in a dialogic process to create meaning. Creating the conditions of learning, in that same view, boils down to an external intervention, aiming at optimizing what is being delivered to the learners, and how they are prompted to act upon it, so as to attain defined learning goals in the most effective and efficient ways possible. No doubt, multiple decades of research and practice, particularly within the instructional design tradition, have shown the considerable value of this view. Both the strength of past achievements and the need for fundamental review and reconceptualization stand out in the ongoing debate as reflected in such overview works as (ed.); (ed.); (eds.). These concerns have similarly been discussed in numerous special issues or special segments of Educational Technology since Volume 31, Number 5, introduced in that issue by (1991).
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Visser, J. (2001). Integrity, Completeness and Comprehensiveness of the Learning Environment: Meeting the Basic Learning Needs of All Throughout Life. In: Aspin, D., Chapman, J., Hatton, M., Sawano, Y. (eds) International Handbook of Lifelong Learning. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0916-4_23
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