Learning and the Marketplace

Because of the contemporary drive to link the corporate and educational worlds, Alison Kirk compares and contrasts the business and academic ways of thinking. Often irreverent and humorous, and always brief, she discusses commonplace words and concepts as they are used in both business and education, presenting a side-by-side exploration of the two major American institutions as reflections of our common and often contradictory cultural values. Using humor as a tool, Kirk makes readers think about the relationship between education and businessor learning and "real life." She combines the features of a dictionary, with its alphabetically arranged entries, and an interconnected series of essays. Adept at getting her message across, she uses illustrations to provide mental resting places that invite readers to pause and reflect. At the end of each section, she provides interlocking and recurring questions to emphasize links and advance lines of thought. More intent on asking than answering questions, Kirk assumes there is no one way to learn. She provides abstract and concrete as well as detached and personal approaches to such issues as diversity, competitiveness and cooperation, performance appraisal and measurement, fragmentation and integration, and the relationship of learning, working, and living. She encourages readers to self-design their own learning. Her advice to readers, in fact, exemplifies her approach: "Margins are meant to be written in. This is a book to talk back to, to correct, and to supplement. It doesn t claim that there is one right answer on everything, and it certainly shares Emerson s distrust of consistency for its own sake." Kirk further reveals her approach and style when discussing the term "What Have You Done for Me Lately?" " ""This is another business expression that recognizes the pervasiveness of ingratitude and shortness of memory. Teachers don t have a comparable expression. Perhaps the concepts of ingratitude and short memory are too familiar as sources of occupational depression."Kirk points out that business and education have much to learn from one another; their essential differences, too, are necessary because our national equilibrium depends on both to meet the needs of head and heart."