It's a brand new semester and one of the classes I'm taking is Learning Policies in Information and Learning Technologies (ILT). One of the required books for the class is The Book of Learning and Forgetting by Frank Smith.
The author discusses two educational trains of thought - the classic view and the official view.
In a nutshell, the classic view says that learning is easy. We do it all the time without even trying. Kids learn to roll over, crawl, walk, talk, cry, get Mom or Dad's attention, etc ... without trying. We join "clubs" and that's how we learn. You learn about music from other people who are interested in/good at music. You learn about history from others who are interested in/good at history. We learn from those we most identify ourselves with. Think of the person who knows every piece of trivia there is to know about his/her favorite sports team. That's classic learning.
The official view of learning is that it's hard work. We have to fight to learn anything, it's all about memorization, we have to take tests to measure our learning, and we forget almost everything as soon as the test is done.
By the way, according to this book, the official view of learning was modeled after the Prussian Army in the early 1900s. This book says official learning isn't effective, but no one wants to admit it.
One story he tells is that a student gets a poor grade on a test. The teacher says "you didn't learn very much did you?" But on the contrary, the student learned a lot. S/he learned to recognize that look of disappointment or distaste on the teacher's face. S/he learned the feeling one gets in the pit of their stomach when they're told they've done something wrong. And the student learns - again - that learning is hard.
Smith doesn't believe these are the lessons we want to teach our children, or ourselves. It's only a 100 pg book; those of you in education might especially find it interesting and useful. I did!
