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There is a popular conception that learning is an individual effort inseparable from passion, cognition, family and cultural background, and similar ideas. People who use that conception argue that learning is a creative process. Learning expresses the unmeasurable authentic uniqueness of the individual. That uniquiness matters more than assessing the person’s immediate responses to instruction, tests, and evaluations.
This is only one view of learning. Each age adopts its own view, somtimes discounting former views for one reason or another.
EduClassics.com reintroduces into such discussions behavioral science descriptions and principles of how people learn. It describes behavior patterns people use to learn. These are impersonal and unrelenting (inexorable).
Learners use behavioral principles to learn. Whether they acknowledge it or not, that includes those earning a classic education and those who accept the uniqueness view.
Common sense has included use of these principles by educators and 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 without necessarily also using principles of how people learn and how the most informed people know what they know.
Classic education includes use by learners of an embedded behavioral infrastructure. The infrastructure is observable, measurable, managable, and replicable, even with 21st Century learning.
Some call this infrastructure a generic process, a social code, or a personal discipline. While behavioral scientists have used Western Canon to describe this process, it appears more generic to learning than to any one tradition of life.
Classic educators implicitly emphasize this infrastructure during instruction. In so doing, classic learning remains the standard against which other instruction and their results are compared.
With any label, classic education prepares people to know how and what underpins civilizations as we know them.
Purpose of Classic Education
First, and foremost, classic education prepares classic learners, that is, it prepares people to learn how to learn in order to know what the most informed people know. Behavioral scientists have described that people learn by following patterns of behavior that lead to what they know. Classically prepared 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.
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.
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 been refining descriptions of how people learn. These descriptions have evolved into a learners’ view. They describe what choice points and response patterns people use to learn. They have also described how observers confirm that learning has occurred.
Behavioral scientists have used empirical experimental studies to describe and confirm learning. These efforts have demonstrated that people learn by using trials-and-errors to choose behavior patterns that result in learning the content of lessons. They make their choices from among a finite pool of options.
Other behavioral scientists have shown how to increase learning by applying these descriptions systematically in and out of schools.
These behavior patterns form an observable infrastructure of learning essentials (OILE). This infrastructure displays the beginning, middle, and ending of individual transactions commonly called learning. Without these essentials, learning does not occur.
The infrastructure has similar implications for learning as the periodic table of elements has for chemistry, and as the table of standard genetic code has for genes and biological organizisms. Without these infrastructures, learning, chemistry, and biological organizisms as we commonly know them do not exist.
Parents, educators, employers, neuroscientists, and others only know someone has learned something when they see changes in behavior patterns. Chemists know that putting together different amounts of certain elements will produce variations in heat and light. 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 21st Century Learning.
Supporters of 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.
Social codes connect 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 and other phenomena. 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 measured school based learning rates and changes in the dominant pedagogy are coincidence or causes in lowering student learning.
Practical with a Thesis
EduClassics.com uses the thesis that learning is the reason education exists as a social institution, including of organizations such as schools. Descriptions of how people learn offer practical guides for contributions of education to society. Classic education through recorded history offers the most tested and used demonstration of instructional protocols consistent with behavioral science descriptions of how people learn.
Summary of EduClassics.com
Descriptions in EduClassics.com of 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 today.