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How are the process of learning in all its complexity and the claim of surplus thinking to be understood and described?

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9788763001687

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It is a genuine pleasure and privilege to write the Foreword to the English edition Mads Hermansen's book, Relearning . As someone who has spent the better part of two decades studying and writing about learning, it is rare to find an original but realistic contribution to the literature on the topic. But this, I think, is precisely what this book achieves. I had the genuine pleasure of sharing a seminar with Mads when I was Visiting Professor at the Danish Pedagogical University in Copenhagen and it was then that I was introduced to his work. We shared a recognition that learning is existential so that it needs to be studied at least philosophically, psychologically and sociologically at the same time in an integrated manner. I have since expanded my thinking to include the physical sciences, since the brain and the nervous system are also very important players in the learning process. Here in this study we are introduced to an integration of the traditional and the non-traditional in learning theory. Here we meet authors whom we usually meet but also those, like Popper and Pierce, who appear less regularly. Here we find a genuine integration of the cognitive and the affective, a realistic appreciation of the function of time in the learning process and a different way of looking at understanding. In the third chapter Mads invites us to Relearn; to look again at some of the traditional theories of learning and to see them in a new light. In the final one we return to the vexed question of why we want/need to learn and look at it in a slightly different way. I have found this short book a stimulating study of learning, providing me with some new insights into the well-researched field of human learning. The book really is about lifelong learning rather than what passes for it in much of the contemporary literature (work-life learning), and it is about human being. Learning really is existential. Reading the English draft has been a genuine pleasure and while, in places, I might want to debate with Mads again about some of his statements, this I feel is the function of a good book. Peter Jarvis, University of Surrey, March, 2005

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