The Study of Human Learning –
Forty Years of Enabling Learning with
Positive Results with Conversation Research
and Systematic Theory Building

The Centre for the Study of Human Learning is committed to the idea, that each and every member of a democracy needs to learn how to become more self-organised. Only as we learn to become more fully responsible for who and what we are, at each stage of our own development, can we begin to participate more adequately in our shared responsibilities with and to others.

The result of much ‘seemingly successful’ education, as it is now organised for us, is the production of Other-Organised-Learners. As previous students, many teachers will recognise the feeling that one only really begins to properly understand a subject when one tries to teach it to others; i.e. when the other organised understanding you have received has to be self organised so that you can sensibly present it to others. How much better if the understanding had been used and self-organised in the first place.

PROFESSOR LAURIE THOMAS
19TH MARCH 1927 – 8TH OCTOBER 2023

Professor Laurie Thomas, Founder and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Learning, died on the 8 October 2023 at the age of 96. Laurie was a visionary but also a very practical academic who both developed the theory of Self-Organised Learning and put it into practice in a wide range of projects and through the many postgraduate degrees that he supervised. He had a significant impact on the lives of many of those who knew him and tributes from some of these, along with a brief biography, can be found here.

Laurie’s approach to life and learning are summed up in his own words which are as poignant and important now as they were the day he wrote them:

“Self-Organised-Learning becomes a way of living. It is on-going, each of us is continually enabled to conduct a more effective Learning Conversation with ourselves. We learn not only how to value, but also to evaluate, each and every expert that we meet and invite to teach us. And in return we conversationally offer them our personal understanding of what they offer, so that they may learn from our mistakes, from our successes, and from our new insights which may hinder, or help them on their way.
So may we become able to make learning democracy work for us. And in doing so we may gain a glimpse of what may really be involved in enabling others to move towards their own more democratic societies. Whilst the dictator uses physical means to restrain the free spirited, we have yet to free ourselves completely from the remaining chains of the knowledge tyrants; and in so doing enable others to do the same.”