Unlearning or ‘How NOT to Be Governed?

Nader Chokr’s book “Unlearning or How Not to Be Governed” aims to show why unlearning should be viewed as crucial for education reform. Challenging the prevalent doctrines in the tradition and the Enlightenment philosophy, Chokr contends that unlearning enables us to realize and tackle the “problem of governmentality” (p. 18), which has become manifest after the 2008 financial crisis (Pedler, 2014). Unlearning, which is about “unshackling oneself” (p. 6) and rejecting the false assumptions that belong to obsolete knowledge, provides the means to liberate ourselves from entrenched ways of thinking by posing such questions as: How are we governed? Do we wish to be governed or to be self-governed instead? The author asserts that unlearning is a pivotal component of education that helps to bring out critical and self-reflective citizenship, and thus contributes to radical and inclusive democracy, or democracy-to-come. I found many of Chokr’s arguments interesting as they offer important implications for the organizational learning and unlearning perspective.

Til publikasjon: https://doi.org/10.1108/TLO-11-2016-0077, https://hdl.handle.net/11250/4340927 | Publiseringsår: 2017 | Tidsskrift: Learning Organization