Preface Lecture Notes

EduClassics.com addresses the question, “How do people learn? What do they do first, second, etc.?” It gives priority to the how over what of earning a classic education.

EduClassics.com illustrates tested ways to use these descriptions in order to increase learning rates promptly and dramatically in and out of schools. Tests were conducted by behavioral scientists who used empirical experimental behavioral designs. Perhaps the site should be named “How People Learn,” “Classic Learning,” or “Learners’ Operating Manual.”

With any name, these descriptions serve as a foundation for stragegies that yield efficient learning.

So What? Who Cares? It’s the 21st Century. Life’s Different.

Learners care as do their advocates. Learners have a finite amount of time to spend in schools and in life. It’s learners’ time, effort, and other resources that pay for their attention to lessons. In return, the more they learn with their payments, the more likely they will benefit from those lessons.

I also care. Behavioral descriptions of how people learn can be lost. Support for these descriptions competes for attention among educators with other approaches and interests. Ubiquitious Internet access makes it difficult to distinguish between scientific fact and other interests in education.

EduClassics.com reports descriptions of learning by behavioral scientists. These descriptions serve as the core for education, whatever the interest.

A Learners’ View

EduClassics.com uses an empirically based learners’ view to describe how people learn. This view features essential behavior patterns people use to learn. Learners and observers can count and in other ways monitor these patterns.

For over a century, learners have been showning behavioral scientists how they adopt, adapt, manage, and extend what others know. Without these patterns, learning does not occur.

Behavioral descriptions of “how people learn” have not been in common use among some people. I found the best descriptions in mystery novels such as those by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Louis L’Amour, and Tony Hillerman.

It took me many years to test and accept behavioral descriptions. They seemed too simplistic to merit use by teachers. Yet, I recognized their use by parents and others who support traditional family life.

So, I tested behavioral principles with infants to nanogenarians to gain confidence in their utility. This confidence contrasts with those, mostly younger people, who argue for wholistic, 21st Century, collaborative, etc. learning. It also contrasts with the movement to certify, credential, etc. education practitioners and managers of learning.

The contrast occurs by accepting or rejecting that learning occurs by individuals in observable, measurable, manageable ways.

An Undefinable, Mystical Art

I had thought of learning as an undefinable art, a mystical something inherent to life. It just happens.

Sometimes it happens as in the legend of Archimedes. He noticed that water rose when he entered a bath: Ah ha, Eureka (I’ve got it – I’ve figured out how to tell if the king’s crown is pure gold)!

I’ve met more educators with a mystical view of ths “Ah Ha!” than those who hold a learners’ view.

I now use a learners’ view. It works as well to observe, predict, and manage learning in the 21st Century as it did for Archimedes. He noted a change in the level of the water when he entered a bath (Fowler, 1995). Other learners can do the same in the 21st Century.

My mystical view of Archimedes Ah ha, Eureka! discovery was incomplete. Today I think of it as ante-intellectual.

At some unknown time, I began evolving a set of behavioral descriptions in mental lists and tables. I used them to anticipate the likelihood that a learner would complete a lesson or resolve a problem successfully. Learning seemed self evident as cognition or thinking even though I watched behavior.

Yet, we all knew then and know now that cognition and thinking are words to represent interpretations of something we sense. At its best, cognition and thinking exist as something we cannot see, hear or in other ways sense.

I accepted that most people already knew and know about learning from personal experience. We all learn every day, even unto death. Therefore, we don’t need technical descriptions of learning, the process.

Interrupted Mysticism and Interpretations

Then, a software developer asked me to describe how people learn, to say the step-by-step process that behavioral scientists have described. Later, another developer asked me to draw a simple flowchart to illustrate how people learn without making reference to cognition and other intangibles.

I could not come up with a simple, comprehensive description or reference for one other than Skinner’s S-R paradigm. Nor could anyone else I knew in education. What exists are uncounted thousands of descriptions from empirical research of parts of what people do to learn. These have accumulated in professional literature for over a century.

Instead of one, I described experiments such as Marc Gold’s use of attention theory to train people with low IQ scores how to assemble bicycle coaster breaks. Developers said to drop “the teacher stuff.” Just tell me what people do to learn.

Failing to have a better response, I tried to describe the mental artifacts I used to monitor and analyze someone else’s learning. That was more difficult than I expected.

I shared various draft descriptions, but almost everyone responded with either, “Who cares?”, “I don’t understand,” or “But, what about (usually something about thinking, cognition, motivation, or environmental conditions such as nutrition, family, or culture)?”

Responders demonstrated that people who believe or in other ways accept that learning exists as a cognitive process do not likely also use the vocabulary or logic of behavioral scientists to describe what observers see, hear, and in other ways sense as learning occurs.

Authentic Adventures

Most of us have met people, including perhaps themselves, who love life and its adventures. They want to live it fresh, at the cusp of discovery, unspoiled by other people’s vetting. They cherish what some call an authentic life.

They don’t want to learn too much that might interfere with their belief about “real” adventures. They argue that classic education and other codified learning processes and accumulated knowledge might get in the way of their innate talents, insights, and pleasures.

I once entertained such sentiments. They’re seductive.

Then I met people who codified some of the classic processes people use to learn. They knew how to use these codes in ways I didn’t imagine possible.

Their technical vocabulary and logic was so foreign that I didn’t even understand some of their jokes. It was embarrassing.

So, I decided to learn what they knew by upgrading my classic education foundation learned in public schools. These classic codes have served me well.

They permitted me to learn descriptions of how people learn. I want to share them with you and urge you to learn them also, including through Classic Education on EduClassics.com.

From a common sense view, learning through a classic education can teach in a short time more about ourselves through what others have learned than we may absorb in a lifetime through our own ways. That’s why this form of education has endured long enough to be called classic.

Risks and Learning

Either on your own or through classic education, life’s a gamble, a risk. That’s one of the principles that you can learn almost painlessly from the trials-and-errors of others.

The pain may come from exchanging the adrenalin rush of free-form-learning for a more reliable (some say more disciplined) approach while resolving mundane everyday life problems to your greater advantage.

Arguably, people with a classic education can have more options in that gamble than do most others, including going mountain climbing and skydiving after learning more quickly what others know.

Mass Market of Mobile Independent Learners and Learning

A review of learning principles used in classic education seems useful as educators, parents, and others reexamine how our roles change in an emerging era of ubiquitous mobile electronic communications. There’s probably always been what I call a Mass Market of Mobile Independent Learners and Learning (MILL), because people likely learn more out of school than in school.

This new era includes the emergence of a mass market of mobile learners. These learners offer new challenges to families and licensed educators for time, attention, and other resources controlled by learners. And, they too arguable learn more out than in schools.

The advent of Tablet and other mobile PCs as well as iPhones and their cousins make global communication possible almost instantly for the price of the equipment and your time as well as effort. These tools permit direct access without other mediation by historic information gatekeepers to any information about any topic around the globe.

Top tier universities and a few private preparatory schools offer coursework online. It’s unclear how many people will avail themselves of classic education online. It’s also unclear what parts of classic education require the structure of an on-site venue.

Yet, anecdotes abound of people who have earned a classic education through extensive self initiated reading, study, and experimenting during their personal adventures without formal schooling. Perhaps their examples will serve as templates for offering more electronic openings to earning a classic education remotely. EduClassics.com is intended to support that effort.

Your Invitation

A teacher suggested that I post on a wiki my descriptions of how people learn, so others can contribute what they know of it from empirical research.

So, here’s your invitation to address the question, “How do people learn? What do people do first, second, etc. How do people demonstrate what they learned?”

Classic Education offers a sample of behavioral science descriptions of observable steps people take to learn. It does not discuss the many arts as well as myths, beliefs, and superstitions about learning that education practioners use. Nor does ignoring these points indicate any judgment or sentiment about them.

References

Fowler, M. (1995). Greek Science after Aristotle. Lecture. (Retrieved July 4, 2010, 9:14 AM. http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109N/lectures/archimedes.htm)

Gold, M. (1960 and 70s). Try Another Way System: Projects, Lectures, and Consultations. Marc Gold Inc. (More specifics later.)