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A Grammar of Learning
You've got to love a gerund, its versatility as noun and verb. Take the phrase "learning to change the world." Learning can be the thing that teaches, the act of absorbing new information, and the end result of that interaction with information. Linguistically and practically, it's all intertwined.
Learning serves different purposes and takes different forms, just as it does grammatically. This issue of The Sophist is dedicated to the theme of learning to change the world.
To help think through our theme, we asked some colleagues how learning changes the world. Joanne Duchastel, of JED New Media, a professional training and performance support company, believes learning is invaluable, financially and otherwise: "Knowledge is the key to economic and social advancement. No one can steal it from you; few can prevent you from gaining it. It is your personal goose that lays the golden eggs that sustain you, your family, your community, and your nation in making a better world and a healthy planet."
For Jacques LeCavalier, author of Making E-learning Work in the Nonprofit Sector,1 "[L]earning changes the world one person at a time, and within that person, one powerful learning experience at a time." Those personal, revelatory, a-ha moments represent one end of the spectrum, and at the other end is the global perspective. "There seems at last to be a global realization of the clear link between education and development, of the fact that exclusion from educational opportunities translates into poverty and social inequity," LeCavalier says, citing the World Bank's growing emphasis on education as a lending priority.2
Those are just two short looks at the profound impact learning can have on individuals and society at large, and more's to come in the rest of this issue. "From Living Mind to Living Mind" takes a philosophical, theoretical approach to learning to change the world, while "Learning to Change the World in Action" takes a more practical--and practicable--look at the concept by examining four projects.
To continue the theme, this issue’s "Monolog" is delivered by Stephanie Eskins Gleason, a driving force behind the National Wildlife Federation's work to change the world through Wildlife University. "In Brief" highlights Web resources to continue your exploration of learning to change the world.
Even if "there is virtually nothing that exists in black and white," as Julie Nessen states in "Learning to Change the World in Action," even if learning isn't simply a verb or a noun, we hope the black and white of this online journal leads you to discover the possibilities of learning to change the world.
The Editors
1 Making E-learning Work in the Nonprofit Sector is published by brandon-hall.com. See http://www.brandonhall.com/public/publications/nonprofit/.
2 In the fiscal year ending June 30, 2003, education’s share of total World Bank lending was almost 13 percent, the highest since the World Bank first began lending for education in 1963. See the World Bank's Web site for more information.
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