Allen Tough, informal learning pioneer

Allen Tough, a brief talk at the 3rd New Approaches to Lifelong Learning (NALL) Conference
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
February 19, 1999

For me, one of the fascinating things was it doesn’t seem to matter where you are or what group you study, you get a very similar picture of informal adult learning, and that for me has actually been the highlight of all this research, as I read all these different studies, is that there seems to be a common pattern, that informal learning just seems to be a very normal, very natural human activity, and that’s why I think we’re all dealing with the dichotomy between that fact and the fact that is so invisible, that people just don’t seem to be aware of their own learning. They’re not aware of other people’s learning, educators don’t take it into account and so on. So there’s this normal, natural thing going on, people are spending 15 hours a week at it or on an average, and yet it’s not talked about, it’s not recognized, it’s sort of ignored or invisible. It seems to happen in all demographic groups.

…

Another finding was that we were looking at all learning efforts, including ‘professionally planned’ or ‘academic or institutional’ or whatever you want to call them; formal. We found a 20/80% split. We found about 20 percent of all major learning efforts were institutionally organized, or it was like a driving school instructor or piano instructor, something like that. It was one-to-one, but it was still somebody you paid to teach you, so it was a professional formal situation. And the other 80% was informal. We didn’t know what to call it. So we called it ‘professional plan’ and ‘amateur plan’, amateur being a positive word, not a put-down. That’s when I came up with this idea of the iceberg as a metaphor, because so much of it is invisible, because we were surprised to find so much adult learning is sort of under the surface of the ocean as it were. You just don’t see it. You could forget it’s there unless you keep reminding yourself that it’s there.

Related

Where did the 80% come from?