Where there is no magic, there is little, if any, learning
In my early
childhood years, I came to think of libraries as places that surely contained
all that was known, and I aspired to go to college because – I believed – that
is where one learns all there is to know.
Nothing, I naively
thought, was unknowable. One had only to seek knowledge. But, as I gradually
learned, the action – all the learning and understanding – occurs in the
pursuit of knowledge. The questions actually multiply faster than the answers,
and that is the charm of education as a search process.
Fantasy is also
important to a child. Dreams are fashioned of fantasy, and out of dreams come
the desire for adventure, the desire to learn, and ultimately the realization
that learning to learn is what is important. In dreams and fantasy nothing is
unattainable – and this is not only a model for seeking, overcoming, and coming
to know, but also – and most important – a model for living.
It seems that this
conception of the role of fantasy for a child was quite unpopular with the
constructivist psychologists of the 1950s and '60s, until it was thoughtfully
reconsidered in works such as Bruno Bettelheim's "The Uses of
Enchantment." It's fortunate that these modern educational fads sometimes
tend to be short-lived.
What has endured
from my early school years are memories of pleasure and excitement in learning,
a search-and-discovery process that was intrinsically rewarding. But that
process was increasingly compromised by the growth of performance testing in
the schools. By the high school years, "learning" had become less
important in proportion to scores on achievement tests.
For example, in
those tests you would read several utterly boring paragraphs of text, and then
answer a bunch of questions that would measure your comprehension of the text.
What I remember is how little of it was worth remembering. This continued in
college, except that now the text was sometimes a bit more memorable. Also, the
math and physics problems carried some intrinsic joy in the process of
discovering solutions.
Graduate school
classes, with some significant exceptions, were often a grand continuation of
education as memory testing. Only the technical level changed; not the
procedures. I'm reminded of the joke told by 2007 Nobel laureate Leo Hurwicz
many years ago: "What's the difference between an undergraduate and a graduate
student? In an undergraduate class, the professor enters the room and says
'good morning.' The class responds by saying 'Good morning.' In a graduate
class, the professor says 'good morning' and the students all write it
down."
Over the decades I
have come to appreciate that where there is no magic, there is little, if any,
learning. What is important is not what you know, but what you can do with what
you know that brings magic to your personal experience of inquiry. What is
magical about research is the discovery it engenders. There is that pleasurable
rush of feeling when the first results of a new experiment come in and you have
started to learn something that no one else yet knows.
Then you realize
that this is also what meaningful teaching must be about: discovering, along
with your students, things that you did not know before: making the unknown
known; realizing that most of the action and the excitement is in the chase,
and in the new questions that emerge along with the answers. Your learning is revealed
in the fact that the new questions could not have been asked before. Libraries
and your computer may record much of this activity, but most of it we learn
from watching and interacting with others and by practicing an art, whether it
is literature, economics, anthropology or physics.
All of this was
captured neatly by Benjamin Franklin, so I want to close with one of his gems.
Tell me and I will forget
Teach me and I will remember
Involve me and I will learn
Whether you are a
teacher, a student or a reader who loves to learn, may the discovery of truth
be ever your pursuit, and may you take joy in the process.
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