New Learning sets out to rethink the enterprise of education, starting with the fundamentals of learning. How is it that humans come to know, as individuals and collectively? The discipline of education is not just the stuff of institutions and their processes. It is about this foundational and expansive question of knowing. This is especially the case today when more and more of what we need to know is being learned outside of formal educational institutions.

We set out to recover the roots of the discipline of education, then redefine its scope and position amongst the sciences and the practical arts. We also consider the sizes and shapes of a genuinely ‘new learning’ in which the dynamics and places of learning may be quite different from our recent modern experiences.

In so doing, we should attempt to raise the intellectual bar for education as a discipline. Too often, education is a messy amalgam of other disciplines—psychology, sociology, humanities, management, and the like. New Learning attempts to position education clearly and firmly as a meta discipline or discipline of disciplines—whose concern is no less than the foundation of human knowledge and identity, and the source of all other disciplines.