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Introduction
Classic education prepares people to know processes and content that underpin civilizations. Classic education has an embedded behavioral infrastructure consistent with how people learn. Learners use this infrastructure regardless of whether learning is called classic, 21st Century, or some other view used to arrange that learning.
This infrastructure consists of choices learners make to complete a lesson or solve another problem. These choices are observable, measurable, and replicable. Some call this infrastructure a generic process, a social code, or a personal discipline. Behavioral scientists have used Western Canon to describe this process, but the process appears more generic to learning than to any one view of life.
Classic educators implicitly emphasize this infrastructure in their instruction. In so doing, classic learning has emerged and remains the standard against which other instruction and their results are compared.
Purpose of Classic Education
First, and foremost, classic education prepares classic learners, that is, to learn how to learn in order to know what the most informed people know. Behavioral scientists have described how people learn: By following patterns of behavior that lead to what they know. Classic learners follow the first priority of classic education whether responding to classic instruction or under other labels such as 21st Century, authentic, or progressive learning.
This text reintroduces to 21st Century learning the behavioral science principles of how people learn. These principles were common sense and practice among most educators and their parents until the last two or so decades of the 20th Century. For various reasons, U.S. public school educators have switched priority to how to teach lesson content over applying what we know about how people learn and what the most informed among us do to know it.
Rationale
Knowing how to learn is one half of the link to what people know. Artists, educators, employers, entrepreneurs, inventers, parents, scholars and others through the ages have connected how with what in order to pass that which they know and do from one person to another, includidng across generations. This connection sets the standard, takes first rank, for learning required for a civilization to continue. Without giving top priority to how people learn, schools, educational software, and other venues intended to increase learning gamble for success with learners’ time and other resources.
For more than a century, behavioral scientists have increasingly described how people learn. These descriptions have evolved into a learners’ view. That is, they describe what choice points and response patterns people use to learn.
Behavioral scientists have used empirical experimental studies to describe learning. These efforts have resulted in demonstrating that people learn by using trials-and-errors to make choices that they select from a finite pool of behavior patterns that result in learning the content of lessons. Other behavioral scientists have shown how to increase learning by applying these descriptions systematically in learning venues.
These patterns form an infrastructure of learning with similar implications for learning as genes have for biological organizisms. Without these infrastructures, learning and biological organizisms as we commonly know them do not occur. Parents, educators, employers, neuroscientists, and others only know someone has learned something when they see changes in behavior patterns. Biologists know of differences among organisims through variations in genetic analyses related to variations in behavior patterns.
Use of behavioral science’s updates of classic education in schools and other venues has lead to increases in education levels and prosperity of individuals and the decline of inequities in the United States during most of the 20th century.
However, the reverse effect has also been true in the U.S. since about the 1980s. Since that time, educators have increasingly experimented in public schools with what they variously term as wholistic, meaningful, authentic learning, and more recently as 21stCentury Learning.
These experimenters have tried to formalize educators’ perceptions of what scientists and creative artists do to generate “new and relevant knowledge”. Such programs rely on variations of extended and loosely guided trial-and-error learning patterns, but without the discipline required by behavioral science protocols.
It is clear that masses of public school learners have not learned from these school experiments what the most informed people know. These masses do not know the social codes of civilization. Without knowing these codes, members of a civilization likely do not participate fully in its benefits.
Think of social codes as connected dots that form familiar images, for example, through poetry, mathematical formuli, sculptures, and songs. These codes show relationships that give order to otherwise random behavior. Codes provide a partnership with the past, collaboration with continuity, and foci for the future of societies and their members.
More specifically, learners have not shown they can manage social codes measured by standardized school tests that demonstrate that they know what the most informed know. Interestingly, few educators argue for instructing with lessons that apply behavioral science descriptions of how people learn.
The most informed people know and use these codes to guide their daily lives. Educators have in the past and can still use them to tell stories to novices of how civilizations emerge, exist, and face their futures.
It’s unclear the extent to which the lowering of school based learning rates and changes in the dominant pedagogy since the 1980s are coincidence or causes in lowering student learning.
In summary, descriptions in Classic Education indicate what learners do to adopt, manage, and adjust social codes in order to obtain more of the benefits these legacies of past accomplishments among those who know the most offer lesser informed people.
Classic education contributes to learning in the 21st Century, just as it has in history. As the name claims, it holds top rank for describing and analyzing learning.
Classic education provides continuity in how people learn across generations and demographic interests of society. This continuity permits people to have a common set of information and processes from which to discuss, work together, and invent, irrespective of personal interests and background.
Some argue that enough wrong things exist with classic education that society should abandon it. They propose different ways of learning. These alternatives appear to give priority to a unified system of education where religious and political ideas of fairness, community, cooperation, etc. serve as templates to build and assess learning. Such counsel appears intriguing and incomplete.
Classes of Learning
Different classes of learning have various priorities or foci, for example, to 21st Century skills, scientific pedagogy, humanism, creationism, and traditionalism.
Some classes represent meeting human needs as a political outcome of community building. Others seek to understand and follow best guesses of how cognition, empowerment, human development, and self-actualization might occur. Some stress religious origins and purposes. A declining minority adhere to solving problems by using scientific and other ideas tested for reliability and utility throughout history.
Shared Assumptions
Irrespective of focus, these practices share two common assumptions. One, that people learn. And, two, that social efforts can increase learning.
Without these assumptions, the social institution of education, with its formal organizations and practices, would not exist. Other social control and so called personal growth mechanisms might take priority over learning to solve problems and adapt to circumstances.
Classic Education
By definition, classic education serves as the highest rank among efforts to increase learning. It has endured through all eras of civilization. It sets a standard against which to compare other classes of learning. These comparisons continue into the 21st Century as they have in past centuries among the most informed people among us.
Classic education uses simplified learning processes that fit various subjects of study. From this view, educators and behavioral psychologists have found ways to adjust schooling and other intentional learning venues for people with the most talent to those with disabilities to learn the same content. Learners who use these processes likely learn the most, the fastest, with the least risk of failure and cost.
The content of classic education consists of those items that inform people about how things came to be as they are. It’s an evolving curriculum with a legacy in the liberal arts and sciences. More recent expansion has added environmental sciences and multicultural studies into some curricula.
Classic Education and Learning Sciences
Scholars and scientists with classic education backgrounds created over the past 100 years empirical evidence that describes how and when learning occurs. Learning sciences (LS) grew from these descriptions.
LS refers to those interdisciplinary efforts that give priority to describing and analyzing learning as a personal and social phenomena. The term captures descriptions of learning that have resulted from systematic empirical studies in the behavioral, cognitive, neurological and social sciences over the past 100 years.
Learning scientists have extended their efforts to creating learning analogs, intelligent (use of artifical or computer-based intelligence) tutoring and instruction systems, and robotics. Store shelves abound with electronic toys that give hints of how these systems can likely increase learning rates beyond those that traditional and contemporary school classroom yields.
Classic Education and Education Fads
Classic education continues across centuries in the face of robust education fads. For many reasons, educators develop and experiment with variations in instruction, learning venues, and curricula.
Proponents of a new way usually conduct their experiments in public schools. They seldom pass their plans first through human rights reviews required of recognized research organizations. These reviews result in assuring participants in these studies that they will not be harmed.
Few schooling fads have evolved from a science based learning theory. Few have resulted from empirical experimental data demonstrating an increase in student learning that closely approximates results from classic education. Yet, almost, if not all schooling fads appear to school policy makers at first to offer some potential to increase student learning.
The longer lasting fads run a life cycle of three to seven years. The elapsed time of each cycle varies according to public funding patterns that underwrite the effort, public policies of the moment, interest of key school decision makers, and the attraction of another new schooling venture to increase learning.
Classic Education and Public Policy
Public policy makers acknowledge classical education as the standard for assessing public education. Those who argue for other criteria for authorizing public funds to education lobby for rationale other than based in learning sciences. They may point, for example, to teacher opinion, employer demands for certain employee skills, global economic shifts, and political equity.
Public policy makers frequently accept alternative rationale for funding. Yet, classical education remains the standard against which they compare results of these alternatives, or alternatives fade away when funding ends.
No one intentionally tracks and reports learning lost (compared with classic education) by students, because they take part in publically supported education fads and experiments.
Classic Education and Mobile Learning
Top tier private and a few public schools that offer classic education programs offer online courses for non-matriculated learners. These courses allow learning on-demand with Tablet and other mobile as well as desktop PCs, hand size electronic communication devices, and iPhones. Such offerings make the efficiency of classic education more accessible to the mass market of mobile learners.
No one tracks the impact of these offerings against classic on campus courses or on formal academic learning standards and conventional school academic achievement.
Summary of Classic Education for the 21st Century
Classic education offers a standard against which to assess the impact education programs have on learning in the 21st Century. No other generally recognized historic standard exists for this comparison.
Efforts to offer alternative standards usually fade away. Efforts to expand definitions of classic education appear to endure longer than schooling fads. Against this context, mobile learning appears to offer another expansion in response to learning-on-demand by people in and out of schools.
Last Edited: August 21, 2015