Two quotations from yesterday's Independent

In an article in yesterday's Independent Education and Career's section, Alan Smithers writes:

Targets and league tables just distort by rewarding teaching to the test.

This is another neat expression of Goodhart's law (which I wrote about in the previous entry in this blog). The key word here is 'distort', because this is precisely what Goodhart claims that targets do.

In another article in this this week's Independent Education and Careers section, my good friend and colleague Alastair Clark from NIACE is quoted as saying:

Learning a new language such as French is more than just wanting to know how to buy a baguette. It's the way people change their view of themselves by learning another language.

I would like to take the key idea here and apply it not just to language learning but to all 'real' learning by suggesting that we might define real learning as:

learning that changes the way people view themselves.

What do you think of this definition?