The name of this website announces that we are here to learn. It is not just that we have a splendid predisposition for learning, or that learning is edifying, or that—in some existential sense—we are condemned to learn. Learning is a deeply-rooted, biological, trans-cultural, life-sustaining necessity.

SOME BASIC PREMISES

Learning, knowing, understanding and interpretation are inextricably linked and overlap each other to a large degree. Learning is the development of new capabilities. Understanding is deep learning. We build it over time. 

Understanding requires making connections, recognizing patterns, finding meaning, judging significance and making logical conjectures. It always has an interpretive flavor. Understanding takes place against the backdrop of previously constructed, analytical and narrative grids that allow us to make sense of the world.  

Interpretation moves between the whole—in this context, the totality of our understandings, thus far—and the particular—the novel things and events that we encounter. The task is to bring particular local detail and whole global structure into view simultaneously. The interpretive spiral of projection and refinement is ongoing.

Our understanding of the world is so bound up with understanding of ourselves that we can say that learning is transformative. Incrementally, or by dramatic leap, it changes who we are. Learning and, its intimate partner, the identity of the self are temporally situated. We dwell in that fleeting moment between the “thus far” of the past and the future orientation of the “as if.”

Homo discens: TOK TOK TOK Essential questions and sources