Suppose, in a rare moment of entrepreneurial zeal, you decided to set up a business with learning to learn (L2L) as your product. You need some funding to get going, so you decide to make a pitch to some business angels – Dragon’s Den style – with the aim of persuading them to invest in your idea. What would you say?

Presumably you’d start by making a robust case for learning as a valuable output; that learning provides the gateway to absolutely everything anyone wants to achieve; that no individual, organisation or society can survive (never mind thrive) without learning; that learning can never be declared obsolete; that learning is the only sustainable competitive advantage… and so on.

That’s the easy bit – the case for learning as an invaluable output is, as they say, a no-brainer. However, the product you want to market isn’t learning as an output, it is learning as a process. You try to explain that learning is a skill that, like any other, needs to be worked at, honed and polished. You say that too many people are lazy learners, taking this precious process for granted, and therefore not learning nearly as effectively as they could if they mastered the process.

But, try as you might to make the case for learning as a learnable skill, the business angels don’t really get it. They have two hang-ups. Firstly, they can’t envisage how people could be helped to get better at learning. Surely, it is a natural process, something everyone is born able to do? Secondly, they can’t see how to make L2L attractive. It isn’t sexy enough to excite them.

Appreciating that you have a hill to climb, you give examples of how such things as study skills, mind maps, accelerated learning techniques and puzzles to exercise the brain have been shown to improve people’s learning prowess. The business angels begin to see what you’re getting at but they still can’t see how this will grab people in the way that holidays or hobbies do. They ask you some awkward questions: what market research have you done to establish a felt need? What is the business case? Where are the figures demonstrating the likelihood of a decent return on their investment?

Sadly, the business angels reject your idea because they can’t see how L2L could ever be a viable product.

What you didn’t tell them is that there is an organisation already in existence that has been successfully marketing learning for the past ten years. The Campaign for Learning recently celebrated its tenth anniversary with a conference called Are we nearly there yet?

The Campaign is working for a society where: • everyone has the right to learn; • everyone understands and values learning; and • everyone has the chance to learn throughout his or her life.

Like all the best vision statements, these words are packed with challenging aspirations. At the heart of these aspirations is the idea that learning is a learnable skill, something capable of development.

I notice that many people (not just business angels!) have difficulty accepting the notion that learning is learnable. There is a widespread assumption that human beings are built to learn: something you can’t help doing so long as you have senses supplying information to your brain.

They argue that babies have the capacity to learn from the word go, long before they can speak or think about how they are doing it. They ‘just do it’, and we know they do because of observable behaviour changes (an outward sign that learning must have occurred).

This must mean, say the doubters, that learning is a reflex, i.e. something that human beings do not have to learn to do.

But, say people like me, there are plenty of ‘givens’ that are amenable to improvement through deliberate practice. Muscles are ‘givens’ but they need exercise to develop them. Breathing is undoubtedly a basic reflex but there are numerous techniques that can help us learn to breathe more effectively.

The temptation, of course, is not to bother to exercise muscles, or to learn to breathe properly, and to leave the process of learning on automatic while you busy yourself with other things.

So what is the answer to the Campaign for Learning’s ‘are we nearly there?’ Mine is ‘no, but please don’t give up!’ I suspect that the Campaign’s vision, like all the best visions, is aspirational and not actually achievable. We will never be there. It is one of those things where the journey, not the destination, is what counts.

Dr Peter Honey, FRSA, FCIPD, FIMC is a chartered psychologist and founder of Peter Honey Publications. He can be contacted on +44 (0) 1628 633946, at peterhoney@peterhoney.com or visit www.peterhoney.com.

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