Fabricating a Theory of Learning

This is the second part of a series highlighting Frank Smith’s The Book of Learning and Forgetting. In the first part, we covered the ‘classic’ view, and we will now look at the ‘official’ view – its roots and its problems.

How did the classic view shift to the official view? Here’s what the author thinks. “The justification for change was – as it still is – efficiency, as defined by some external authority. People of influence thought pupils weren’t learning very much during their time in school [the model being the one-room schoolhouse]; pupils seemed to do what they liked while they were there, and their teachers didn’t appear to have much control over them. There was a total lack of organization – and organization was what enabled western industrialization to take off in the nineteenth century. This was the age when management, drawing on science and technology, seemed capable of solving any problem.”

Reading this, it occurs to me that much of how I structure my workday relates to the three terms in italics: efficiency, organization, management. And the way I have measured my improvement has often been in these terms. I think this subconscious hewing to efficiency belies a greater problem, but a complex one for which there might be no easy solution.

In any case, Smith continues: “There was a search for a model of what schools (and teachers and students) should be like. And one was found. The model was nothing than the mightiest fighting machine in Europe, the Prussian army.” Instead of a haphazard recruitment and training strategy, they “selected recruits of the same age, height, weight, and experience, put them into separate barracks, subjected them to remorseless discipline and drill, threw out the ones who couldn’t make it, and forged a totally standardized, predictable and reliable product – the Prussian soldier.”

This may be the crux that efficiency forces upon us – standardization of parts so as to reliably fit into a working system. As the complexity increases (inevitable with growth), more parts need to be interlocked more smoothly into the integrated whole. This brings with it increasing potential for crisis – where one screw-up could bring down the system – thereby requiring further complexity through engineering fail-safe mechanisms and further devices. The explosive growth of student services in universities is perhaps one sign of what is happening in the higher education sector. How do we “help” the mass of students get through to the product (degree completion)? How can we monitor (via data analytics) how they are doing in all aspects so that intervention can take place where necessary?

The author points out interesting parallels in the jargon of education and the military: “We talk of the deployment of resources, the recruitment of teachers and students, advancing or withdrawing students, promotion to higher grades, drills for learners, strategy for teachers, batteries of tests, [attacking a problem], attainment targets, reinforcement, cohorts, campaigns…” Not only that, “it wasn’t just the physical structure of schools that was split into largely meaningless parts. So was time itself. The school day became a grid of ‘periods’ devoted to compartmentalized aspects of learning. And the more difficulty students experienced learning something, the more likely they were to receive more fragmented and disjointed things to learn…” (For an example of doing things differently, here’s a post on the block system – a system nevertheless.)

But unlike the efficient Prussian army, the same barrage of techniques does not seem to have produced efficient results – as we can observe by the constant hand-wringing of promise-making politicians. Who tends to be blamed when a new innovation does not work? Teachers. In the old days, there was an art to good teaching. Now it needed to become a science thereby ushering the reign of the official theory to supercede the classic theory of learning and forgetting.

Chapter 7 shares the same title as this blog post: “Fabricating a Theory of Learning”. I think of fabrication in two senses – a streamlined engineering process as we discussed above, but the word also carries a connotation of an edifice built on a shaky foundation, even a lie. This is the chapter I find the most troubling especially since I have in recent years tried to incorporate a number of things from cognitive science and educational psychology. I’m a scientist after all. What could be better than scientific methods to hone in on ‘best practices’ (a totally overused phrase)?

The author’s most damning critique begins with Herman Ebbinghaus, “an itinerant philosopher who developed an interest in scientific methodology after his military service, with the victorious Prussian army, in the Franco-Prussian war.” He would introduce a method to take scientific measurements of learning and forgetting. The baseline problem is that it is difficult to isolate aspects of learning because there are so many variables between different people (test subjects!) including past experience, interest, home environment, culture, the list goes on. “What experiments need is a method of control (another revealing piece of professional jargon) so that the learning task is fundamentally the same for everyone.”

And that’s how the nonsense syllable was invented. Nonsense? Really? Yes, because when you have something that doesn’t make sense or fit into a prior framework, then you are on the same footing as anyone else and presumably would learn in the same way. What is the measurement tool? The clock. You measure time taken – how long it takes to learn and recite a list of nonsense syllabus, and how long it takes to forget such a list. (You also keep a count of number of errors made.) I have reproduced the results in the two curves below.

And what do we “learn” from this? That anyone can learn anything as long as you spent more “time on task”. It is no wonder that students come into my office distraught after an exam given all the time and effort they spent “studying”. (Note that Smith would argue that a regime of tests is misguided in the first place.) It’s also no wonder that the next semester, very little is remembered from the previous semester in the prerequisite class. Easy come, easy go – at least if the students did not really make much sense of the material, certainly at a deeper level. That’s why cramming is a short-term strategy. If your goal is to just pass a particular test, then this might work. But if it is to learn, that’s a different story.

While building on an edifice of nonsense is scary, things gets worse. Smith argues that the reason such “laws of learning” were adopted, mainly by “people with influence outside the classroom – politicians, bureaucrats and experts” was the seemingly scientific approach that guaranteed results (however you construe this), and that teachers and students lacked organization and/or effort. More perniciously, the official theory allows a semblance of control. Lists to memorize came in. But they needed to be measured with scores. And those had to be kept as records. Sound familiar? That’s what it feels like today to be a teacher – you give scores and keep records. Even worse, it was now possible for students to cheat, by “unfairly” earning scores for themselves or others.

What has suffered are the relationships that underpinned the basis of the classic view of learning. The author writes: “The teacher was no longer the collaborator or even the guide. The teacher became the official in charge of work and the collector of the scores, chained like the students to standardized instructional procedures… Cooperation, which had previously been the key to learning, was driven underground. Students changed in their attitudes toward each other… as they competed at their individualized learning.”

Chapters 8 through 10 expand the thrust of 6 and 7. The inglorious history of testing and its proliferation is examined. This is followed by elevating systems over people, thereby separating the decision-making leaders from the robotic implementers. Logistics reigns. We are reminded of terms familiar to us: time lines, quality control, objectives and of course there’s the ubiquitous task force. A look at job titles and descriptions shows an increase in the use of the word management. Then there’s the subjugation of learning principles to what can be simulated or measured with computers and other instruments – if we can’t consistently measure something scientifically, it is banished to the realm of folklore and anecdote. I won’t elaborate on these: the picture painted is depressing enough.

There is no simple solution to all this. My small take-home lesson for the day, because that’s all I can digest for now, is not to prize efficiency over relationships. Perhaps awareness is the first step to recovery.