With thoughts turning to education, a few notes from the last chapter of Etienne Wenger’s 1998 book, Communities of Practice:
Education, in its deepest sense and at whatever age it takes place, concerns the opening of identities — exploring new ways of being that lie beyond our current state. …
To the extent that knowledge is reified, decontextualized, or proceduralized, learning can lead to a literal dependence on the reification of the subject matter, and thus to a brittle kind of understanding with very narrow applicability. …
[T]eaching does not cause learning: what ends up being learned may or may not be what was taught, or more generally what the institutional organization of instruction intended. …
If an institutional setting for learning does not offer new forms of identification and negotiability — that is, meaningful forms of membership and empowering forms of ownership of meaning — then it will mostly reproduce the communities and economies of meaning outside of it.
