Continuous learning

getting organised as the relationship between experience and context

• Esa Poikela Tampereen yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33336/aik.96933

Abstract

ln the debate touching upon adult education, Finland has in a relatively short period of time passed through three stages differing from one another in terms of quality.
In the 1970s, the old liberal adult education ideology was broken through by a school of though professing educational technology born as a cross between work and training; according to it, knowledge was to be efficiently packaged for those in need of it.
ln the 1980s, this talk of educational technology receded and its place was taken by talk of (and experimentation in practice) based on cognitive course didactics and didactic applications of the theory of activity. People set out particularly to draw the line between behaviouristic and cognitive learning concepts. The problem that still remained involved crossing the administrative and didactic rationalism embodied in these two concepts. This was a problem to the extent that the most fervent critics considered cognitive didactics as being merely an extension of educational technology.
ln the 1990s, the debate focused on life-long education and learning tinged on the one hand by the psychological points of departure of the individual’s capacity to learn and on the other by the structural, cultural, social and functional supplementary conditions acting on learning. The functional relationship, in which experience is seen to form the base for learning and context as directing learning, is coming in a new way to the centre of thinking on educational science.