Page 77 - The Drucker Lectures

58 [ The Drucker Lectures

organ, “the mind,” divorced from, indeed opposed to, “the body”
or “the emotions.” “Learning,” the schools assume, is a separate
activity, divorced from, indeed opposed to, “doing.” At best, it is
a preparation for “doing.”
In the Socratic tradition, “learning” had nothing at all to
do with “doing”; to connect the two was a vulgar debasing of
“learning” and the destruction of “knowledge.” And “learning,”
because it was “preparation,” was for the young. The stage in
the life cycle in which the human being was deemed sufficiently
mature to have attained “rational understanding” but not mature
enough to be able to do productive work was the time for “learn-
ing.” And one stopped learning as soon as one began “doing.”
Today we know that learning is a continuing biological pro-
cess. It begins at conception and ends only at death. And there
is no difference at all in the way the infant learns or the adult
learns. There is only one learning process.
We further know that “learning” is not an activity of one
specific “learning organ”—the mind or the intellect. It is a pro-
cess in which the whole person is engaged—the hand, the eye,
the nervous system, the brain. It is indeed the specific process
of living beings, from the most primitive to the highest forms.
There is a beginning to life and an end to life. But there is no
beginning to learning and no end to learning, though there are
sequences to it.
And so “school” as the institution in which one “learns”—
while every place else one “does,” whether in “play” or in “work”—
is becoming untenable. The baby’s crib is equally a “learning in-
stitution,” as is the job or a severe illness. School not only has to
adapt to itself the little we know about how human beings learn,
it has to change its image of itself as something apart and quite
unrelated to the rest of personality and life to something that
organizes, heightens, and affirms a central and existential fact of
total human life experience. It will have to restructure itself to be