Overview

This chapter characterises three different kinds of educational experience: didactic, authentic and transformative.

Didactic education is relatively old, with roots as old as writing. However, it came to near-universal prominence as a mode of learning in the mass, institutionalised education that emerged almost everywhere in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. The experience of didactic education is still common today, for a variety of social, cultural and, at times, practical reasons. Mass, institutionalised education allows parents to work while schools take care of children, imparting the basics of reading and writing. Perhaps more importantly, however, didactic teaching inculcates in children a sense of discipline and order. It has teachers and textbooks telling, learners absorbing what they are told, and when it comes to the test, students getting their lessons right or wrong. In the didactic classroom, the teacher establishes a pattern of relationships in which students learn to accept received facts and moral truths, comply with commands issued by the teacher and absorb the authoritative knowledge presented in the curriculum. In these classroom settings, students learn to get used to a balance of agency in which they are relatively powerless to make knowledge themselves or to act autonomously.