The Learning Society and Learner Identities Essay

The Learning Society and Learner Identities - Essay Example Helping my elder sister to home school her daughter reminded me of the passion that I used to have for learning, and I became interested in going back to schooling myself, and followed the ideas that had been inspiring me when I was much younger. Eventually I settled on beginning a Bachelor’s Degree in Teaching and Learning. I found that I wanted to understand more about the processes that were behind learning, and about how knowledge was imparted from one person to another, and one generation to the next. This was an immediate step for me, and I moved to my Bachelor’s degree immediately after finishing high school. The degree was fascinating, and I learnt a lot about myself and about education. I was certain that this was the area that I wanted to continue to study in and I decided to continue my education with a Master’s Degree in Learning and Development. I was strongly interested in the focus that this degree had on development. This is the degree that I am s tudying currently, and I am glad that I made the decision to do this. Working-class Conflicts One of the conflicts that are often observed between schools and families is through working-class relationships. Working classes inherently have different priorities and viewpoints than many people within the school system, and this can lead to differences of opinion for the direction that the child should go in school and in life (Reay, 2001). Reforms have attempted to make Australian schools more more of the differences between working-class families and other types of families that are encountered. However, issues of class remain present in many schools, as well as in the school system itself (Connel, 2003). The conflict between working-class families and schooling was one that was present... This essay approves that one of the conflicts that are often observed between schools and families is through working-class relationships. Working classes inherently have different priorities and viewpoints than many people within the school system, and this can lead to differences of opinion for the direction that the child should go in school and in life. Reforms have attempted to make Australian schools more more of the differences between working-class families and other types of families that are encountered. However, issues of class remain present in many schools, as well as in the school system itself. This report makes a conclusion that people return to education for many different reasons, and this is especially true for adult learners. For some, education is a chance to increase their skills in order to perform a job better or to make them more attractive for a specific job. For others, like me, education is sought not because it is a tool for a better future, but for the sake of learning itself. In that respect, adult education is for me and many others, a social endeavour and the process of learning are often associated with reinventing oneself. The author gives an example of the conflict between working-class families and schooling which was one that was present during my own secondary education. His parents are both from the working class, with his father being a builder and his mother being employed in the food industry part-time while caring for our family. Both of his parents were more interested in me obtaining skills that were physically demonstrable, rather than abstract knowledge. They wanted him to stay in secondary school until he graduated, because they felt that finishing high school was an essential component of me getting a ‘real’ job. They strongly pushed him to take courses that were more practically orientated, and to avoid ones that were mostly theoretical, with little application to the ‘real world’.