The purpose of this article is to clarify the epistemological basis of self‐regulated learning. The authors note that learning to learn, a term that has pervaded education policy at EU and national levels in recent years is often conflated with self‐regulated learning. As a result, there has been insufficient attention paid to learning as social performance and to a more nuanced conceptualisation of agency. A review of the literature on self‐regulated learning suggests that self‐regulated learning is behaviour that is oriented towards the optimal execution of predefined tasks. The authors suggest that the consequences of this are a resolute focus on the individual learner and a striking denial of learning as social performance. They trace the origins of self‐regulated learning to ad‐hoc combinations of behaviourism and cognitive psychology and explore the consequences of this for the way in which learning to learn is conceptualized. They argue that a reflexive social epistemology is a necessary counterweight to the systematic neglect of learning as a social process that has resulted from the psychological turn in learning theory.