Traditional human cultures understood learning as active and having purpose, while schools have to convince students to learn out of context information
As theories of learning become more sophisticated, the question of why keeps coming up. Why do we do what we do, and why do we choose to learn, or not? Traditionally, human cultures have answered this question through communities of practice. We do what we do, because it is how we live our lives. We learn through doing, because those are the skills we need in order to live well. They would conclude that education should be oriented toward whatever is important in the students particular culture and environment. Schools answer this question by creating a set of circumstances which they hope will give children reasons to learn. They need to do this because the social learning environment—a community—is sapped by dissociating learning from context.
The question of why we do things (or don’t do things) is fundamental to what it means to be human. That’s why education is not as simple as designing the right curriculum and watching the children learn. That might work for the rats running through their mazes, but human learning is far more complex. For humans, meaning and context are an integral part of why and what they learn. We ignore this at our peril.
References
- Fisher, Naomi. (2021). Changing Our Minds Chapter 2. Learning – Scientists, Processors and Rats (p. 56). London, UK: Robinson Publishing.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Politics / Education / Psychology / Cognitive Science Status:☀️