The disciplines that have developed for the study of these two phenomena are known in higher education as "Linguistics" and "Education", but their histories as the sources of professional and scholarly understanding have taken different routes. Both are characterised, like most disciplines, by the tension between tidiness and manageability on the one hand, and closeness to their object of study on the other. The first takes us towards idealisation and formal models, and the second towards contextualisation and embeddedness in "real world" data. Linguistics has tended to move towards idealisation and formalisation of data, while Education has tended to resist calls for a formal science of learning. This is partly because Education is inevitably bound up with conflicting goals about the nature of the society it is aspiring to create, and political debates about control and investment. Linguistics is less liable to external political interference in the definition of its goals and procedures. Nonetheless, language and learning are so deeply implicated each with the other that it is difficult to conceive of a study of education in which communication and language are not central issues.