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NOTES ON LEARNING AND EDUCATION

Sergio Andrs Rueda

I think what education does is attempt to provide a formal enunciation of the thought processes
that we are cognitively capable of, so that, on the one hand, different approaches can be used for
different problems (for example, understanding mathematics linguistically), and on the other,
some internalized operative assumptions can be rendered visible and therefore opened to analysis
and transformation. So we can characterize education as a transformative transmission where
reception is not meant to be repetition but intends to transform both the listener and the
message itself. Another way I'd put it is that education is opening of a problem to language.
I think it works in both ways, in the sense that a mathematical proof is understood when it is
possible to formalize it the language of mathematics, or, in another sense, a form of objective
invisible violence becomes understood when the victim is able to formulate the terms of
victimization or violence. So that the question remains, in which way, (or is there a "way", among
others) in which problems should be opened to language?
So maybe we can say that once we approach education through language, the fluidity of language
becomes a characteristic (ideal?) of education, all with its passion for allegories.
This could be a way to create a distinction between learning and education, where education
always implies a linguistically approach that falls into a certain "trap", and appears to
asymptotically approach "learning", which always exceeds it.
The problem is that I realize one depends on the other. I proposed "education" as the opening of a
problem to language, and (implicitly) the transmission of that problem in a transformative way. I
remember reading a story about Spanish Guitar Player Paco de Luca being the only person to play
the Concierto de Aranjuez without reading the notation. I would describe this so: his method of
"learning" a piece did not pass through the (linguistic) mediation of notation but through another
complex cognitive process. On the other hand, when a student is given the notation, (along with
the training to make sense of it) there is this mediation of the rules for transforming the signs into
a performance, but at the same time, the other complex cognitive process (which I proposed to
call learning), is also occurring, so that the performance of the notes eventually also becomes
"second nature" and is not mediated by the conscious translation of signs into a performance. In
this sense education seems to approach learning asymptotically in that it tries to approach the
cognitive apprehension of the first instance (what is commonly known as playing "by ear") through
its negation (playing by reading).
So I am then working with this distinction:
Education: The opening of a problem to language or the attempt to facilitate cognitive
apprehension of a thought process through its negation (notation or translation to language).

Learning: The creation of a thought process that may include but is not limited to language.
So I find that retroactively (resting on the definition of education) Im defining language as
notation, that is, the ability to assign meaning to a symbol in a contingent manner (i.e. in a way
such that the symbol did not necessarily imply its meaning)
But then, is this a sufficient (or even accurate) notion of language? There is another problem; I fall
again into a distinction between language (representation, the symbolic, etc) and an undefined
counterpart that can only be referred to negatively (that which isn't representation, the symbolic).
A key passage here would be the part, in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses where
Althusser ponders about whether or not Ideology has a history, in this sense:
If Ideology has an Omni-historic nature, a nature beyond class struggle and social formations, then
the ideological deadlock is a constitutive one for human thought. Then we can situate the trap
of education as the inevitable recreation of ideology beyond the historicity of its current
incarnation (for example with regards to an emancipatory project of education, such as this one).
Ideology is eternal in the sense that we must always enunciate in an ideological manner (in a
manner which implicates a submission of learning to education).
Forgive me if this is just a linguistic trick, but I wonder:
If all this is the attempt to "educate learning", i.e. the attempt to create a formal notation that
would direct the creation of thought processes, is it possible to "learn education" i.e. to apprehend
in a cognitively complex manner the mechanism through which a complex thought process is
reduced into a notation and a content? Is this what philosophy is (could be)?

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