How Do People Learn?

Those of us in education need to come to terms with this question, and in a major way.

Right now, the operative theory is that people learn by, well, a kind of enforced magical osmosis. Public schools put teachers in front of groups of 20-30 young people, sorted by age, and then give them a specific body of content that the teacher is to, what?, instill into their brains by a series of clever, or not so clever, activities--including lecture, reading, inquiry, experimentation, discussion--all lorded over by the threat of evaluation.

In any event, by this theory, learning happens when passive, empty vessels are gathered together in a room, and a certain amount of content is poured into the head of each child where it stays uncontaminated and completely accessible forever.

Of course, we require that the teacher "measure" how much content made it into a student's brain, assessing their reproduction of the learning experience, believing that this enhances student and teacher motivation, and also so the system can select for the best and brightest.

And now, because we no longer trust teachers to either instruct or assess learning fairly, rigorously or consistently, we have invoked standardized tests that presume to measure just how well this whole learning process has happened.

So that, out of this grab-bag of individual teaching approaches and content exposure, after a teacher holds students accountable for what they learned, and the bureaucracy holds teachers accountable for what they taught, and the voting public holds politicians accountable for enforcing all this, we hope that what emerges will be a well-educated, well-rounded, well-prepared adult.

But, because we are not sure and don't trust that this whole thing actually works, we continue to measure learning outcomes on cheap, easily scored standardized tests.

Yet, as we all know as classroom teachers, the ideal of education as described here, which has already slipped a great deal from its pedestal of idealism, rarely holds sway over the absolute reality of what occurs on a daily basis.

Whether individual students are absent, ill, tired, excited, pre-occupied, hungry, cold, hurting, depressed, sad, hopeless, in love, bored, or just plain in a state of ennui, can and does dictate the quality and depth of learning on a particular day. And taken together, groups of students impact each other and sway other individuals this way and that, meaning that, teachers perform their job on an ocean of variable moods, emotions and shifting waves of attention, hopefully alert of when to hoist sail, drop anchor or call the hands on deck for a pep-talk.

But, in any case, there are no empty vessels sitting passively waiting to be filled, and if there were, there is not a good way to cut up content into digestible parts so that all the many different students acquire knowledge equally, and if there were, there would be no way that the skills of all the many different students would grow or be stimulated equally, and if there were, there would be no way that all the many different students would show equal interest or intensity for the learning experience, and if there were, well, there would no longer be any such a species as homo sapien.

I bring this up because in most discussions of education today, there is an extremely mechanical conception of how learning happens: the teacher teaches, the student learns and the standardized exam measures success.

If that is how it really happens, then we don't need human beings at all. Why not just leave young students in front of well-prepared videos or power-point presentations and tell them there will be an exam immediately following "class"? Those who pass can move onto the next video presentation; those who don't can sit through it until they do.

I believe that this 1984, Brave New World scenario is not that far off from what current task-masters think is the ideal and the norm in America's classrooms.

Of course, and this goes without saying, they are wrong. Very wrong. Extremely wrong. Dead wrong. And in being dead wrong, they are, in fact, killing the process of learning, and attempting to strangle, in its tracks, the very notion of public education.

And now, on top of everything else that teachers must do, from creating lessons, to grading homework, to encouraging each child, to reassuring parents, to battling administrators, to working collaboratively with other staff, we have to explain to the public exactly how it is that learning happens. Because if we don't, the public just might come to believe the passive vessel theory as described above and wonder why the test scores are not all perfect, as required by NCLB in 2014.

Most of all, teachers need to explain what learning is so that we humanize the process of being human, and demonstrate that learning is fragile and not coercive; that evaluation is not the prime motivator for most young students; that the personal human element is always the first and most important issue to be addressed; that creativity, having fun and being curious are the hallmarks of intellectual excellence; that the process of learning is more important than the actual product; that all these things require human judgment, intuition, creativity and great skill.

That's what a good teacher really is: a person of great and varied skill.

And teachers need to explain all this to a public whose attention span is about long enough to hear only whether grades are good or bad, whether test scores have gone up or down, whether public schools are failing or not.

Seriously, teachers need to have a clear understanding of what learning is, how it happens and how they can contribute successfully to its full unfolding around them. Failing this, teachers become mere cogs in the vast machinery of an enterprise that is meant to squeeze all that is human out of the experience of learning, and which serves the interests of those who understand what true learning is and why it is to be avoided at all costs.