Authority and autonomy

I came across this great quote this morning, and don’t want to lose it. Hence:

"The challenge of all teaching is to integrate the authority of the facilitator and the autonomy of the learner. ….. Why have any kind of educational authority, however benign? The obvious answer is so that knowledge and skills can be passed on. Otherwise, everyone has to learn everything from experiential scratch- which would be the reduction ad absurdum of experiential learning theory. But herein lies the tension, between the passing-on on the one hand and the primacy of personal learning on the other. For learning itself is necessarily autonomous, that is, self-directed: it is constituted by interest, commitment, understanding and practice. Each of these is self-generated - they are negated or distorted by any attempt to instil or impose them. Learning is also necessarily holistic, that is it involves - either by inclusion, or by denial and alienation - the whole person …."

John Heron ‘The Politics of Facilitation’, in Mulligan and Griffin(eds) Empowerment through Experiential Learning