active process that completely engages the learner with goals that are intrinsic. Education is a noun, not a verb, a set amount of facts and concepts that have to do with accepting certain aspects of a culture. I talk about getting an education, not the process of becoming educated. Universities still more or less operate under the old paradigm of learning, based on Locke's tradition of the empirical blank slate (Emery 1979, p.1). In order to qualify as truly a new paradigm, universities would need to teach constant adaptability, encouraging students to respond to the environment as "a driver of a moving vehicle (Emery 1979, p.1).
At times university departments and various administrators may participate in learning retreats themselves, off-site workshops to solve the problems of the university, but is this like moving a Ford board of directors meeting to a Zen center (Starkey 1996, p.35). It is as if the focus is on the wrong thing, solving a symptom when the basic difficulty with universities as learning organizations is that the administrators and faculty are not themselves consistent learners. It is doubtful that part of the job description for each university worker is to master a new task or to complete a certain number of credits themselves. If such a job description occurred among university workers, it would be truly radical. I would really like to hear what university professors do during their summer vacations. I want to know how the person teaching me is continuing to learn. This is not to say that universities do not have some individuals with pioneering aspirations, individuals who represent very different ways of perceiving the environment; however these types of instructors are very much in the minority, as the usual university education requires a split of the head and the heart, denying the humanism of the student (Bowden 1998, pp.39,47). In fact Bowden asserts that the literature regarding learning organizat...