SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING IN THE LIFE COURSE

1 A Concealed Training Revolution

As Dumazedier has pointed out (1980), we indeed seem to be facing a new social fact which we must, however, qualify more precisely today. Instead of referring to self-learning as a particular subject, means, or mode of learning, we have approached it within an educational autonomization perspective, according to a dialectic of power, by formally defining self-learning as the appropriation of one's training force (Pineau and Marie-Michele, 1983). By evoking such a dialectic, we join Dumazedier (1980), who defines self-learning as a "reinforcement of a subject's desire and will to regulate, direct, and manage his or her educational process more independently" (6). "Self-learning on one's

own, whether it be collectively or individually, requires a self-liberation from blind determinism as a source of stereotypes, ready-made ideas and prejudices, created by the social structure" (16). "Self-learning implies a double social deviancy in relation to the dominant social norms within or outside of a group" (17). According to structural determinism and cultural conservativism, this double deviancy makes self-learning seem "an aspect of a concealed revolution which we have called the cultural revolution of leisure" (17). The inversion of the quantitative relationship between work time and leisure time within industrialized countries is, of course, historical (Dumazedier, 1982), and has an influence on the possibilities of training by oneself. By perceiving the possible specific educational time values which are less socially constrained, we have come to the hypothesis that night-time is — in a very day to day and concrete way

— the best moment for self-learning because that is when hetero-training ceases (Pineau, 1983). However, self-learning is too often perceived — especially by socially dominated individuals — as a difficult struggle for survival of every instant and in every environment, and this prevents it from being unilaterally linked to moments of leisure which are not necessarily educational moments. Self-learning goes beyond social living environments because of its almost impulsive drive, which Kaës analyses as a radical fantasy whicµ he calls "the myth of the phoenix" (Kaës, 1973, 67). It does indeed seem to be the expression of a process of anthropogenesis which goes beyond the social and educational

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traditional environments. In order to understand and work on this process, it is necessary to link the knowledge of self-learning with the elements of the theory

of forms and with the emerging sciences of autonomization.

2 The Rise of Training as Morphogenetic Function

Training has entered the field of educational thought quite late and by the back

door of professional training, as an 'inferior' form of education. It is, however, rapidly acquiring a central position, as Rene Barbier has analyzed in his

reference work: "Self-learning, a permanent questioning" (Barbier, 1984, 101). Indeed, self-learning brings about a revival of educational thought, according to

a certain number of theoreticians, who are receptive to the harmonics of self-

learning and to the different theories of form which have been developed and are

still evolving. "The progressive substitution of the term training for the terms teaching, instruction and education - which has already taken place concerning

adults — is the sign of a profound revolution in our conception of pedagogy" (Goguelin, 1970, 17). This revolution is so profound that it has difficulty finding

its language, as it brings up the concept of a permanent ontogenesis which

therefore becomes morphogenesis: "Human beings do not solve their problems

by adapting, that is, by modifying their relationship to the environment, but by modifying themselves, by inventing new internal structures, by linking

themselves with the axiomatic dimension of vital problems" (Simondon, 1964,

9). Training then becomes the function of human evolution (Honoré, 1977, 57).

This function, however, consists in synthesizing, structuring and organizing, into

a living unity, the heterogeneous multiple elements of the living (physical, physiological, psychical, social elements ( ... )). This function is continuously

being applied, for the living unity is never self-evident. It is continuously apprehended and modified by two kinds of pluralities: one being a synchronic plurality of constant interchanges of its internal and external multiple

constituents; the other being a diachronic plurality of the different moments and evolving stages of human beings. "There is a plurality in human beings which is

not a plurality of parts (the plurality of parts would be situated beneath the unity

of being), but a plurality which is even situated above this unity, because it is the plurality of being as phased, within the relationship of one stage of being to

another" (Simondon, 1964, 268). Therefore, even more so than in a stable state,

this unity exists within a unifying metastable process which would be the

permanent performance of the training function, the permanent pursuit of the

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right form. "Thus, the right form is no longer the simple form, the geometric

replete form, but· the significant form, that is, the form which establishes a transductive order within a system of realities with certain potentials (... ). The

right form is the structure of accountancy and viability, it is the invented dimensionality according to which we have compatibility without degradation

(... ). Form therefore appears as active communication, the internal resonance

which operates individuation" (Simondon, 1964, 22).

This form appears with individuals and, at this stage, it is first of all the product, within a viable environment, of the encounter of elements pertaining to two other individuals. It is therefore the joint result of hetero - and eco- training. But, as

soon as this result appears, a third term comes into question: that of the trained individual himself "Human beings are not only the result or product of

individuals, but also the theater of individuation; they possess a more complete

state (than that of physical beings); not only does individuation take place at the limits but at the center as well, by internal resonance" (Simondon, 1964, 22).

This third term — however fragile and dependent upon others as well as upon the physical environment — nevertheless constitutes the starting point, the permanent and increasingly active support for the ulterior stages of development: a self-

learning force is born.

3 The Vital Cycle of Self-Learning

The birth of this self-learning force has been and is still being debated by a

number of people, because it is yet incomplete and due to the fixist or evolutive concepts of the course of life. This explains the poor state of advancement of the study of its development. Between the negation of this force by the disciples of external determinism and its massive affirmation by the followers of internal determinism established in an almost magic way, research on autonomization in

and by dependencies opens a third route. Within such shifting, this force would fortify itself by using the forces which it depends upon, first as a reflex-reaction,

and subsequently as reflection-action.

We will dispense with the first phases — the first stages of childhood and adolescence — which have been thoroughly explained by developmental, and

more recently, self-developmental psychologists and psychoanalysts (see the

special 1985 edition of the Revue Québecoise de Psychologie on this subject),

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and we will directly concentrate on the characteristic which we consider

essential to adult stages and which the reflexive prefix 'self ' refers to; this characteristic being the reflexive dynamic of self-learning which follows the

process of a vital cycle. Self-learning during one's ultimate stages means

proceeding to a double appropriation of the training force and implies assuming

this power — becoming subject — but also applying it to oneself, that is, becoming

a training object for oneself. This double operation divides the individual into a subject and an object of a very particular type which we may call self-referential. This division broadens, lightens, and increases the autonomization capacities of

the interstice, interval or interface between hetero- and eco-training which the individual is, at first. An environment, a space of one's own is created, thus

offering the subjects a minimal distance from which they can see and consider themselves as a specific object among other objects, differentiate themselves

from these other objects, reflect upon themselves, emancipate themselves from

other objects, and autonomize themselves, in other words, to proceed to self-

learning. The person-system is born (Lerbert, 1981; 1984).

This duplication does entail risks, particularly that of hardening, according to

Yves Barel's analysis (1984); the created double autonomizes himself, mistakes himself for someone else by denying that others or himself originated this duplication (the myth of the phoenix). However, as long as there is interaction, reflection and correction between the two elements, this might well be an

inevitable process of autonomization. "Above all, autonomy, for an individual or

a group, consists in their becoming their own final aims to themselves, their own transcendence, which is self-reference, and which induces other forms of duplication" (Barel, 1984, 235). "Slight duplication is the establishment of a

simple form of recursivity defined by the alternation of aphase of self-expansion

and a phase of self-withdrawal of what was displayed or expanded; or else by a movement away from the self towards the non-self, with a recurrent return to the self. Slight duplication is known as self-referential, even though, according to

the rules of the game, this should not be admitted" (Barel, 1984, 230-231).

In the ultimate stages of self-learning, in which its specificity is developed, as compared with the breaking-up and vague external references, self-learning can appear as a compulsory self-referential strategy of autonomization struggling

against the risks and paradoxes of duplication. Which reality must we confer to

this strategy and its 'confused' products? The answer largely depends on one's position concerning the course of life.

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4 Dialectisizing the Conceptions of the Course of Life

If the research on, and therefore, knowledge of, self-learning is so poorly

developed, it is due to the almost exclusive focus of the pedagogico-positivist paradigm on hetero-training. This focus is usually accompanied by a static

concept of the course of life according to which the major changes take place

during childhood and adolescence, adult life only stabilizing these changes

without creating other changes of such great importance. This concept serves

and is principally determined by the classical and psychoanalytical learning

theories which almost exclusively focus on what was acquired during the period

of biological growth. We would be but slightly exaggerating if we claimed that

these theories proceed by going back as far as possible towards the initial years

of life in order to find the crucial moment which irreparably predetermines and stigmatizes the entire ensuing course of one's life. Any impression of an ulterior profound change is but a self-illusion. Also, self-learning is but a more or less neurotic ideology which aims at occulting and repressing initial hetero-training

and final self-decomposing. This static concept still largely dominates the vision

of the course of life, particularly in Europe. The few researches and essays on

adult stages are either ignored or considered with condescension as the works of naïve authors, unaware of the unconscious weight of the past.

According to Danielle Riverin-Simard (1984, 125), due to the development of

the category of elderly people and their problems, the first model of evolution theories has been developed based on studies concerning the other end of the

course of life. She refers to this model as a "model of deflation" or "medical

model." It is "directly based on the biological determination of the

performance". In fact, it is more of an involutive model which studies the

progressive biological deterioration of deflation. The second model - called that

of compensation- "claims that the intervention of the environment can

compensate for the deficits programmed by biological maturation" (Riverin-

Simard, 1984, 125). This was also popularized by the development of

gerontology.

According to the classical theories of psychoanalysis and learning, and according

to these models of deflation and compensation, the cross-road of the course of

life — situated between growth and biological deflation and which nonetheless represents nearly one half of this life (fifty years) — would be a flat desert

without major changes, whereas we currently know that it is precisely during

one's working or prolific life that the possibilities of achieving things and of

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accomplishing oneself are the greatest. In order to palliate this distortion, a third series of models, called sequential, is developed, whose evolution is neither isomorphic nor ontogenetic, but polymorphic and interactional. The develop-

ments are the result of interactions between individuals, environment, and the relationship between the two, and appear in sequences, stages, or cycles. It is

within this series that Riverin-Simard positions her model of professional development which she calls spatial due to the importance of the passages to be operated according to these stages and which, she claims, are analogous to the passages from one planet to the other, and provoke the same swaying,

weightlessness and addiction phenomena. We will present this model at length in order to demonstrate that this adult stage is not as flat as specialists on growth

and biological deflation consider it to be, at a distance, and we also believe this

adult stage to require a very good physical condition and even permanent conditioning in order for it to be crossed at the right speed and at the right

moment.

5 Self-Learning and the Course of Working Life, Accor-

ding to the Life-Cycles Approach

Riverin-Simard's model (1984) was built upon a quasi exhaustive critical study

of the models already existing, and is based on a longitudinal and transversal

survey carried out in Quebec in the years 80-81. The inquiry consisted of semi-structured interviews with 786 working adults selected according to their age (between twenty-three and sixty years of age), sex, social-economic status (high, middle, and low) and the work sector (private, public, parapublic). It is therefore

a model which bases its findings and structures on precise data. Because the data

has not yet been completely processed and due to the great variety of what has already been processed, we will only be able to present one part, about training.

In order to situate them, it is important to have an idea of the model's dynamics

and structure.

One of the main conclusions reached by the research, and which is basic to the construction and naming of the model, is that adults go through "almost

permanent states of questioning" (Riverin-Simard, 1984, 20) and that "in

general, these moments of questioning are remarkably dominant in adults of all

ages; they are greater in intensity and duration than moments of reorganization.

This leads us to believe that adults at work always live more in a state of

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uncertainty rather than of stability. Periods of questioning are therefore not exceptional moments in adult life; on the contrary, they are constantly situated at

the heart of daily life at work" (148). The existence of this almost permanent

state of questioning disrupts the classical models of professional life, which are,

for the most part, still static, either according to a linear model of the career:

choice - training - realization - retirement; or closely linked to the biological

cycle: "settlement, steadiness, decline (Suger); self-determination, assessment,

rest (Buhler); becoming productive, maintaining the company's productivity,

and contemplating one's productive life (Havighurst); test, stabilization, and withdrawal (Miller and Form)" (130). Therefore, if change is a constant in this

"flat desert" of adult life, and not a disruption within a stable state, our modes of understanding really must be rendered dialectical. Riverin-Simard (1984)

attempts to do so by proposing a multiple-sequence model, articulating three

great periods and nine stages which alternate, according to an inter-stage cycle

of questioning, either on the aims or the modalities of professional life, and according to an inter-stage cycle of questioning and stabilization.

First of all, she relativizes in a very direct way the age factor which is perceived

as a chronological landmark and not as a causal variable. It is an index-variable

of a certain number of events-elements which profoundly mark the evolution of

time within a given society. These indexes are closer to the Quebec society of

the eighties and other similar societies than, for example, to the antique Roman

or Greek societies, or even the Ethiopian society of today in which the average

life expectancy is of about thirty-five. After presenting this situation, she first distinguishes three important periods in professional life: a period of landing and exploring, in which a first round slowly takes place (one must move ahead on the social scale), approximately from age twenty to thirty-five. This is followed by a second period (from thirty-five to fifty) dominated by the reflexive processes

which enable a certain distancing: the lessons of the first period are learned and people try to discover their personal paths. Lastly, after age fifty, transfer moves

are taken in order to find a promising exit. For each period, she distinguishes

stages of about five years, each characterized by a specific questioning, but in

which we may perceive an alternation between stages focusing on problems of occupational aims and objectives, and others, focusing on the means of reaching them. The thirties, for example, are marked by the search for a promising professional path; people at age forty-five search for a guide-line to unite the different periods in their lives; at fifty-five they begin questioning in order to

find a valuable exit and at sixty-five a series of fundamental 'serious' questions appears, about the meaning of professional life and the meaning to give to the

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remaining years. The answers to these important common questionings which

the author describes in great detail vary, of course, from one person to the other, from one group to the other. The differentiated treatment according to sex,

social-professional status, and occupational sector is in the process of being accomplished. The work merely presents the more global behavioral patterns

valid only for the sample of subjects. Among such patterns appear an average

pattern and another one concerning what the author refers to as the exception-subjects, who represent close to 15% of the population. In order to throw light

upon our tentative approach towards self-learning throughout the course of life,

we have chosen to focus on the relationship of these two categories of people to training during these stages of life at work.

What principally comes out of the data of Riverin-Simard is the fact that the

major turning point between the two categories of people, as for their

relationship with training, intervenes as soon as the start of the second period of

life at work, towards age forty. For both categories, at this age, there is a clear distancing from organized forms of education: "The different organized

educational modes of adults throughout institutionalized, associative, or cultural activities, as well as the training accomplished in the work place, clearly seem

absent from the daily reality of adults of thirty-eight to forty-two years of age". [Whereas this distancing is not compensated by anything for most subjects, it is followed by the] "discovery of the key means of self-learning for the exception-subjects (15%) [which the author calls "exception-explorers" at this stage]. For exception-explorers, the almost unique means of learning definitely seems to be

that of investing oneself into a perspective of permanent education. This key

means consists of an incidental or planned self-learning, accomplished while carrying out one's occupational tasks" (Riverin-Simard, 1984, 65).

This great turning point was prepared for in the previous period by a different moment of reaction in the same starting situation created by the arrival on the

job market. This starting situation is characterized by two major discoveries concerning training. The first discovery is that of an immense gap between

scholarly learning activities and those required for professional practices. The

second one concerns the importance, the value, and the constraints of training at work. However, when facing these discoveries, most people totally deny the

value of formal education, whereas the exception-pilots discover and rapidly

make use of adult courses in order to tighten the gap. Others make this discovery

at the following stage when looking for a better 'job'. By this time, the

exception-searchers already begin to acquire their training power by trying their

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best to link the received training with their ambitions and by being attracted to

forms of individualized learning and of self-teaching methods. At the thirty-year stage, when professional competition increases, organized training areas are considered by these exception-runners as privileged areas where one can

discover good trainers, rather than as a major asset or a life-saver.

After the turning point of the forties, accompanied by the discovery and accomplishment of self-learning for exception-subjects, there is an increasing difference between the two categories of people, concerning their relationship

with training. When most people search for a guide-line in their lives, they no

longer associate training with themselves. Then, when the problem of modifying paths arises near age fifty, these people doubt their learning abilities, regret the opportunities they missed, underestimate formal education and overestimate

their experiential training. Also, the third important period in life, concerning the great transfer moves outside of the professional field, begins with a true torment about their training possibilities and defensive attitudes of rejection. A desire to learn, though often conditional, reappears towards sixty, when subjects must

decide either to concentrate on remaining as long as possible on the 'work-

planet' or, on the contrary, to move away from it as soon as possible. In the end,

the 'serious' question of retirement often encourages their resignation.

By acquiring their training power, exception-subjects (15 % of the sample) live through these stages in very different ways. While searching for their guide-line

(at age forty-two, forty-seven), they find in continuous training an insurance and guaranty of finding this guide-line, of developing it and of pursuing it. The questioning which appears at age fifty over-stimulates these exception-

navigators. "Being situated at the limits of youth and wisdom stimulates their

need to learn" (Riverin-Simard, 1984, 84). When they enter the last period, they define themselves as permanently self-learned people. The closer they come to

old-age, the more they consider training as the antidote, the preventive form; but

also as a productive form. "Some have well-defined study-projects to start a new career ( ... ). As they want to write about genealogy during retirement, they must learn how to do research" (Riverin-Simard, 1984, 107). At around seventy, they define themselves as 'intellectually hungry' people who enjoy reading, seeing expositions, visiting, traveling, auditing conferences ( ... ). Retiring form working

life does not mean retiring from active life, but adding a certain depth to it; professional life is situated and analyzed within the entire context of life, of

one's own life, but also of the lives of the past and future generations. "This

adult is also trying to come to terms with a reflection race; he sometimes seems

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impatient to take time with himself in order to think things over. These thoughts concern ( ... ) life, death, success, old-age ( ... )" (Riverin-Simard, 1984, 118).

By reaching the limits of nature, they are confronted, or have been confronted, to

the great vital problems, once abstract and metaphysical, that ecology has

brought back down to earth. "Whether conscious of it or not, and whether it be explicitly voluntary or not, the ecological currents almost carry out, through their concrete protestations, the task of rehabilitating the sacred in societies in which the effort of modernization ( ... ) has contributed toward the dilution of cultural

values outside of which communities no longer have souls. However, to be sure

to be understood, ( ... ) by sacred, we mean that which resists us, that which

escapes the constructing-deconstructing-reconstructing power of practical intelligence, the intelligence pertaining to the homo-faber. Thus defined, the

sacred is therefore not only the acknowledgment and acceptance of these limits,but also that which is situated, according to us, before and after our ability to act efficiently" (Ardoino, 1984, 7).

Experienced more or less actively and dramatically, the process of self-learning

in old-age directly depends on the natural limits, on that which is situated before

and after our ability to efficiently act. The noose of hetero- and eco-training is tightening, thus making self-learning eventually appear. This is the last

metastable stage of evolution which each person experiences in his or her own

way. This study on life at work does not concentrate on these relationships

between self- and eco-training which, fortunately, are not limited to these

ultimate and dramatic confrontations. This is not the object of this study, just as

it has not been the object of many 'educational' studies. As for eco-training or training according to the environment, we recommend as a major reference the

book by Pierre Furter (1983) as well as the earlier work by Romuald Zaniewski (1952). However, the relationships between self- and eco-training, which are

both subtle and massive, and both part of the micro- and macrocosm, have just recently emerged to the frontier of 'normal' educational consciousness (Allard,

1977). In order to become fully aware of them, we must use new approaches to

the course of life which offer the possibility to the participants of expressing themselves. The same kind of approach is to be taken with life experiences.

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6 Self-Learning and the Course of Life at Home, Accor-

ding to the Approach of Life Experiences

The appearance and development of life experiences, between research and

training, was the subject of the double series of Permanent Education in March

1984. Rather than seeing it as a new technique of hetero-training, it highlighted

its relationship with self-learning (Jobert, 1984, 8). By enabling the subjects to

gather and assemble the different pieces of their lives which had been scattered

and dispersed throughout the years, life experience makes them construct their

own proper time, which gives them a specific temporal consistency. The development and establishment of this personal historicity might be the major characteristic of self-learning, that which founds it dialectically by activating,

and maybe even creating, the unifying process of the double plurality which we presented earlier. Hence the major importance of life experience in constructing

and acknowledging self-learning.

From the long research carried out with Marie-Michele (Pineau and Marie-

Michele, 1983), we will only rapidly present here that which concerns the relationship between self- and eco-training. The centrality of these relationships

is due to the way in which Marie-Michele structured her report and from the

spatial typology which, from the closest to the furthest, enabled her to analyze

the construction of her self-learning.

Marie-Michele spontaneously separated the story of her life according to the different areas where she lived. This spontaneous spatial periodization

demonstrates the importance and the fruitfulness of the different areas of life in a person's path. "The earth, mother, refuge, nurse in all its femininity is that

which, at last, gives a consistency to the different individual and social

situations" (Maffesoli, 1979, 61). These diverse changes, this residential

mobility, relatively high until age twenty-six (not more than an average of three years in the same area) are used as principal landmarks by Marie-Michele for situating and developing the different events in her life, and what she makes of

them. However, these changes are provoked by external factors: mother's

sickness, bad neighborhood, father's accident and hiring, husband's work place,

the landlord's death etc. Marie-Michele therefore does not control this important dimension of the determination of her living environment. As such, she inherits

the traditional situation of a woman's spatial dependence, first as daughter, then

as house-wife. This spatial non-control materializes, by reinforcing it, the social

and particularly masculine dependency which is a burden for women's self-

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learning, even more so at home. The first and foremost obstacle to women's self-learning is an omnipresent masculine power which not only saturates the social-cultural and social-professional models to the point that it is invisible, but it also structures the living environments. Woman's self-learning, more than any other,

is caught up between these two natural and cultural forces, which often join

together to conform woman, model her and use her according to their own norms

and interests. Consequently, more than any other, feminine self-learning is an emancipation battle to appropriate one's training power and to construct one's

world, one's personal environments; not founded upon nothing, but based on the establishment of active relationships of organizing the environmental elements.

The analysis of Marie-Michele's self-learning process tries to show the

polemical and progressive birth and development of these different transactions

with the elements of her different constituent environments.

The break which was considered as the foundation-starting point of Marie-

Michele's self-learning program was the spatial and social break operated by her marriage at age twenty. By deciding to be united with another and to leave with

him, she spatially breaks with the original family environment. She starts her own home; an environment of her own ( ... ) though not exclusively and

automatically, for it is also her companion's and they inherit the roles of a

married couple from a social model. She will thus have to struggle daily to avoid being reduced to the role of queen of the household; particularly since this

household will be composed of five children and will have to find its own

specific position among other neighboring households with original neighbors, adopted neighbors and people from other neighborhoods close-by. Therefore,

this household is not a virgin space to occupy, but a potential and charged space

to actualize. It is on this basis that Marie-Michele will try to give life, not only without losing her own, but also by producing her own life. What does this mean

in more concrete terms ?

In order to find out, we have adopted, following the work of Moles (1975), of

Nuttin (1965), and of Lerbert (1984), a relational and ecological conception of

the person, by seeing her as a support for different relationships in different environments. These environments, these 'human shells', fit into one another,

from the closest, the corporeal environment, to what appears to be the furthest,

the metaphysical environment, en passant par the habitat environment, the

relations environment (family and friends), the neighborhood environment, the

social environment, and the physico-cosmic environment (Pineau and Marie-Michele, 1983, 241). A person's self-learning is considered the constructing of a

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system of personal relationships with these different environments, a

'construction which creates a personal environment' (Lerbert, 1984), a 'singular cosmogony' (Finger, 1984), a particular 'individual-world structure' (Nuttin,

1965) or an 'individual-environment functional unity' (Nuttin, 1980). In such

ways, all of Marie-Michele's transactions with these different environments have been analyzed as possible indexes of self-learning.

Transactions are practices which are overloaded with meaning, for they

condense, within a precise paradegme different groups of elements which are

internal and external, past and future, and conscious and unconscious. They are therefore most often transversal, transductive, uniting elements of different

groups or of different temporalities. One relevant example of a transversal transaction whose real meaning is invisible to an outside observer is the fact that Marie-Michele shook hands with a cousin who had sexually aggressed her more

than twenty-five years before. By this hand shake, Marie-Michele establishes a relationship, her own relationship to this event which had deeply affected her relationship with her body, and with her other relatives. She integrates this event

in her own way. She self-trains herself by transforming a heteronomous

relationship into an autonomous relationship. An example of a transductive transaction, in as much as its meaning implies different groups, based on a

precise practice whose effects are spread out from one relative to the other,

concerns Marie-Michele's petition for the development of circulation in her

suburban neighborhood. The neighborhood is an environment in which personal, material, and social relationships are defined by concrete association. The development and control of the neighborhood is an elementary but fundamental mediation for articulating the individual and society. Individuals either partly

master the development of their neighborhood, thereby mastering their own

selves, as well as his or her relationship with others; or they do not master it and

thus find themselves atomized, or isolated, quite vulnerable to dominant social relationships. In Marie-Michele's case, either she found herself even more

isolated in a house in the suburbs, lost among so many others, or she succeeded

in uniting her home to other homes in order to create a community environment

of solidarity. Within this appropriated environment, she can inhabit and create

her own home while at the same time being united to other people. This explains why the creation, in a transactional mode, of this elementary social and spatial relationship seems important for her own self-learning. While relating the story

of her life, Marie-Michele mentioned and worked out over two hundred

transactions with others and with elements/events in life in order to try to

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understand them after having lived through them, and therefore to apply to

herself her own self-learning power.

7 Conclusion

Self-learning is still an unknown dimension in life, in which subjects, objects,

aims, and means of training are confused, and not only according to pedagogues. Different approaches, particularly those of life cycles and life histories, are taken within this course of life, or, rather, within these multiple courses of different

and complex lives. We have tried to analyze the data which has come out of our research with macro-concepts of hetero-, self-, and eco-training. These attempts

have yet to be transformed. However, the awareness of permanent training

within the course of life seems to correspond to the elementary constituencies of

this life - the self, others, nature. Can this be said to be a paradigmatic

revolution? Why not? After the first paleocultural period of hetero-training

which tried to impose itself as the whole of training, the neocultural age of self-learning seems to appear today, thereby turning the process of training into a permanent dialectical and multiformal process.

References

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