Botkin, Mahdi Elmandjra, and Mircea Malitza. Aurelio Peccei
states in his foreword, “All we need at this point in human evo-
lution is to learn what it takes to learn what we should learn—
and learn it.” The authors go on to define “the human gap” as
“the distance between growing complexity and our capacity to
cope with it.... We call it a human gap because it is a di-
chotomy between a growing complexity of our own making
and a lagging development of our own capacities.”
The authors describe the two principal modes of conven-
tional learning:
- Maintenance learning, the most prevalent, is “the acquisi-
tion of fixed outlooks, methods and rules for dealing with
known and recurring situations.... It is the type of learn-
ing designed to maintain an existing system or established
way of life.” - Shock learning, almost as prevalent now, occurs when
events overwhelm people. As the authors put it, “Even up
to the present moment, humanity continues to wait for
events and crises that... catalyze or impose this primitive
learning by shock.... Shock learning can be seen as a
product of elitism, technocracy and authoritarianism.
Learning by shock often follows a period of overconfi-
dence in solutions created solely with expert knowledge
or technical competence and perpetuated beyond the
conditions for which they were appropriate.”
In other words, both maintenance learning and shock learn-
ing are less learning than they are accepting conventional wis-
dom. Society or one’s family or school says this is the way
Knowing the World