Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, Second Edition

7. Learning and Development in Higher Education

. . . the ways in which we believe and expect have a tremendous effect on what we believe and expect. We have discovered at last that these ways are set, almost abjectly so, by social factors, by tradition and the influence of education. Thus we discover that we believe many things not because the things are so but because we have become habituated through the weight of authority, by imitation, prestige, institution, and unconscious effect of language, etc. We learn, in short, that qualities which we attribute to objects ought to be imputed to our ways of experiencing them, and that these in turn are due to the force of intercourse and custom. This discovery marks an emancipation; it purifies and ...