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utility for later life or a specific set of values, in which the individual is invited to further
understand herself and her world: “an endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure in
which, in imagination, we enter into a variety of modes of understanding the world and
ourselves and are not disconcerted by the differences or dismayed by the
inconclusiveness of it all.”
For all the romantic abstraction of this ideal, Oakeshott’s conception of learning
was eminently practical: “acquiring something you can use because you understand it.”
The simplicity of this concept allows Oakeshott to escape the “famous dilemma,” as he
called it, which seems to underlie Gardner’s two models: the dilemma between
approaching learning as either the acquisition of knowledge or as the development of the
personality of learner. To put it another way, it is the dilemma between standardized or
individualized approaches to teaching and assessment. At the most fundamental level,
for Oakeshott learning is a defining characteristic of the human condition; we become
human only through learning. As a result, it becomes impossible to conceptualize
knowledge as something external to the individual that has value independent of her self-
understanding. Everything we know is in terms of what it means to us.
The implications of Oakeshott’s way of thinking for teaching and assessment
emanate from his understanding of knowledge. On this view, knowledge is comprised of
two components: information and judgment. Information refers to the explicit ingredient
of knowledge (“knowing what”) represented by facts and other impersonal matter found
in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Judgment (“knowing how”) pertains to the “tacit or
implicit” component of knowledge that cannot be reduced to information. By itself,
Oakeshott held, information is indicative neither of knowledge or learning, strictly
speaking. “Information has to be used,” he argued, “and it does not itself indicate how, on
Convention