Transfer of learning and its ascendancy in higher education: a cultural critique

Abstract

Transfer of learning has long been posited as a goal of education. Recent ideological developments have raised transfer's prominence in higher education: increasingly, universities measure their success by the transferability of graduates' skills and knowledge to the workplace. A cultural matrix of social psychology provides an alternative discourse, holding that many psychological characteristics and values that underpin transfer are based on assumptions that may not apply universally and that, accordingly, transfer may not be the central goal that it is frequently assumed to be. This discussion presents a critique on an adherence to transfer that ignores values that may be equally important to students' personal and social development. In so doing, it advocates the application of the cultural matrix to the theory of transfer of learning. It concludes that, paradoxically, recognition of divergent cultural values from around the globe, including the East, may guide universities back to the western cultural tradition of a liberal education.