Heutagogy

Somewhere along the way, adults forget how to decide what they want to learn.

School does a lot of things for a young person, some of them excellent, but one effect is that by the time you reach your twenties, most of what you have learned has been chosen for you by someone else. A curriculum, a teacher, an exam board, a parent, a career adviser. You got good at responding to prompts. What you often did not get good at was noticing, on your own, what you did not know and what you needed to find out, and then going and finding it. This is a problem that does not announce itself, because school ends and the world just sort of assumes you will figure it out, and most people do, badly, by trial and error, over decades.

Heutagogy is a word coined by two Australian researchers, Stewart Hase and Chris Kenyon, for the study of self-determined learning. Not self-paced, which is still someone else's content delivered to you at your own speed. Self-determined. You decide what matters. You decide where the gaps are. You decide what counts as having learned it. This is what the best professionals quietly do across their whole working lives, and it is almost never taught explicitly. The irony is that most of what makes someone genuinely capable after they leave formal education depends on this skill, and most of what happens inside formal education discourages it. If nobody had set the goals for you for the next year, how easily could you work out what you actually need to get better at?

Last week we said grown-ups have to learn to set their own goals. This week we look at how knowing things has quietly changed shape in a world where the answer is always a few seconds away.