What medieval people got right about learning (2019)

TFA misses a key difference between apprenticeship and classroom learning. Apprentice training tends to be one-on-one. When classroom instruction is done one-on-one, learning dramatically improves. This is called the "two sigma problem" in the educational literature. Ignoring this aspect gives the other factors discussed in TFA exaggerated significance.

I learned in college that I didn't learn anything until I worked the problem sets.

(It always seemed like I learned it, but when faced with the problem sets I discovered I hadn't learned anything yet.)

It's the same with everything. You can watch a yootoob video on rebuilding a carburetor all day, but you don't know nuttin until you take it apart yourself.

I decided to learn to ride a dirtbike. I took some personal instruction from an expert, and promptly crashed. Again and again and again. Finally, my body figured out how to coordinate the controls.

Can't learn how to double clutch downshift from watching a video, either.

Medieval craftsmen often ran what we would consider to be sweatshops, with many young (i.e. child) apprentices banging out work and not receiving much instruction in exchange. We're romanticizing and idealizing a past that was, in realty, often quite exploitative.

There are reasons why we started sending children to schools rather than businesses for basic education. There is also little need to reach back to medieval times when comparatively less exploitative (but still imperfect) apprenticeship systems are alive and well in the trades today.

One-on-one practical instruction related specifically to what you want to do is awesome, but there are a lot of difficulties in incentivizing people to supply such instruction.

The author is a good writer, able to expand upon (and illustrate) ideas articulately and convincingly. However, quite a lot of this doesn't quite apply to actual practice in education, particularly in science.

High-school and undergraduate science classes tend to pair lectures with labs. Practical work is very much the focus of those labs, and the lab instructors work closely with students who need help. And a postgraduate degree typically involves a student working side-by-side with a professor on practical work.

As for the pyramid model, I think the author makes some good points, especially for the grade-school level. However, it's simply a fact that being comfortable with adding comes in handy before moving on to multiplying.

Good teachers find ways to motivate students, and adjust those ways as the years flow by. They know how to do their job, and I trust them to find the best practices.

One thing I've heard from many teachers, especially those who are notably effective, is that teaching theorists are not of much help. And I see that in the silly trends that higher-ups impose on teachers. That way of teaching multiplication that has worked for generations? No good -- we must scrap it. The practice of teaching students to write cursive? So quaint - time to toss that in the trash bin. Years later, I see the results of these trends, when students come to university.

The problem of teaching theorists coming up with silly ideas is a result, I fear, of the system of educating educators. How do you get a PhD in a subject? You have to come up with a new idea. Nobody got an advanced graduate degree in education by writing a thesis that said "teaching is fine as it is." No, that PhD student has to say "this is broken, and here's how to fix it." But some things just aren't quite broken, not really. Sure, some adjustments might be helpful. More one-on-one tutoring would be great. Although then, the non-theorist immediately sees a problem: we don't have enough teachers, as it is.

I would wager the benefits of this model come mostly from the 2 sigma boost one gets from one on one instruction and not from any sort of optimal skill tree progression a master would impart on a student in a pedagogical environment engineered for optimal knowledge and skill acquisition.

It's not that bad in theory, but it's true that modern "no homework!", "no boring practice!" etc directions have done a lot of damage during last decades. But it answers quite well to common complaints why we are still learn to solve quadratic function in school although almost nobody uses it later in their lives? It's because quadratic function is a simplest way to lay a foundation to understand a tons of broad theoretical concepts about functions – turning points, zeros, decreasing, increasing, symmetry etc.

Apprenticeship is generally for the so-called servile arts. The article completely neglects medieval education in the form of the liberal arts, and specifically the trivium and quadrivium. These are experiencing a minor resurgence in various forms in classical education curricula.

> Classes are divorced from the practical applications of learning. Apprenticeships train in exactly the situation you’d want to apply the skill.

Hmm .... Something like in the movie "The Hunt for Red October", the US Navy wanted:

(1) Start with recordings by US submarines of underwater sounds, and write software to estimate the power spectra using the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) and the Blackman and Tukey, "The Measurement of Power Spectra".

(2) Given ships at sea and a war, how long would the US submarines last? Start with some WWII analysis of search and encounters by Koopmans and do a Monte-Carlo Markov process, generate many independent sample paths and average.

Gee, how could I do those without my academic courses in analysis and probability? And there are more examples, including the crucial, original core math in my startup.

Apprenticeship is alive and well across Europe, most famously probably in Germany. The majority of young adults there completes one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprenticeship_in_Germany

So I don't know what medical education is like in other parts of the world, but in Austria it involves a lot of practice. Doctors spend a lot of time practicing medicine under supervision before they are allowed to practice on their own. Specialists work as "assistant doctors" for a few years before they can open their own specialist practice.

It's not a question of theory or practice; you obviously need both to learn advanced skills.

People back then just needed to learn one skill, say baking. Then they ply that trade for their lives.

Our economy changes so fast that we need more generalized skills to adapt. If you were apprenticed as a telephone operator, what would you have done? So we learn math, science, communication, etc.

Kids are absolutely right - much of it you will never use to make money. But if you learn how to learn, then that will help make you successful no matter where you go.

I feel like this article hits on a good observation but draws the wrong conclusion. Education may have very well come to underemphasize practice. However, I think that a pure learning by doing approach throws the baby out with the bathwater. It's also not what I've observed in my (admittedly limited) experience with apprenticship:

I worked as a field service engineer setting up servers and similar systems for a while. The place I was sent wasn't a union job but many of the workers were from the local union. I was very impressed with the apprentices. They would work half their week at our site and the other half attended training at the union hall. It seemed to work well for everyone: they seemed to learn a lot, the union developed it's next generation, and we effectively got an extra worker for half of every week.

It would be interesting to see a model like (half on the job and half in the classroom) that applied to more professions. E.g. in programming, universities seem to neglect the practice while bootcamps seem to neglect the theory.

This really speaks to me.

I teach SwiftUI to people. I've written books and teach classes. The books don't work nearly as well (because many people just read it instead of actually practicing SwiftUI). The classes I teach ("workshops") are extremely hands on, I try to defer my explanations to after the exercise as much as possible. The feedback is often very positive, and I can tell afterwards that people have really grasped stuff. I know I'm just trying to confirm my biases here as well, but to me, there's nothing better than doing stuff first and then analyzing it.

I think this article shows nicely what we in modern days get wrong about education, even though it's premise is wrong in my opinion. These are just my opinions, and I am not an educator by trade, so take it for what it's worth.

This article starts with the premise that we go to school to learn how to work. In a world where that is the case, yeah, apprenticeships are far better. It happens that many people look at schooling that way, but I don't believe that's even the correct way to think about schooling.

School originally was not about learning to do a job. It was about learning how to learn. That's why writing papers and doing homework used to be such a big deal, because while you might have been stuffing your brain with knowledge about, say the history of bronze-age Europe, what you were really doing was learning how to find facts, how to organize them, and how to take useful notes.

The problem is that in the past 80 years or so, we've started to see school as training to work. Whether it's primary school teaching us to be good factory workers, or college teaching us to be good office workers. College and university came to be viewed as a way for poor children to move up the social ladder. But to do that, you need a good job. And the best way to get that good job is to teach you to do it in university. So you end up in a situation where schools don't teach students how to learn, and since group instruction is a bad way to learn how to do a job, they don't really teach students how to do a job either. And in some countries you pay out the nose for the privilege.

It's just an ad for a series of self-help books.

I'm not sure if concerete seeing/doing is the only, or even most effective, way to learn.

I've often learned by recalling the concepts from a lecture, reasoning about the material, and imagining what some of the problems would look like while sketching out solutions in my head. It's not any easier than doing the homework, but it is more convenient and flexible. And it can sometimes help with physical skills.

Theory is still important because it communicates how other people understand what they do. But it's certainly not a replacement for reasoning and experience.

I've found the best model of learning is to... not have a "learning process" in the first place. I try to understand as much as possible from as many angles as possible. This means big concepts, minutae, my ideas, other people's philosophies, imagined scenarios, hands-on-experiences, tangentially related concepts, and so on. Being able to answer questions or do the task is more of a side-effect than the intent.

This is a very utilitarian view of learning. Mass education isn't meant just to teach you marketable skills, it's quite explicitly designed to create a shared understanding of the world, a nation. Plus in "medieval" times people also went to church a lot where someone lectured you from a book, with similar goals in mind.

It seems that the author prefers to ignore the fact that, throughout history, apprenticing has been reserved for the common people, while teaching was reserved for their masters, the rich and the powerful.

Having both is better, but at some point you need to learn the theory.

Much of Europe still has apprenticeship programs for the trades. The loss of this in the US and the UK shows in the quality of work: anyone can claim to be a carpenter, or painter, or whatever: whether or not they have any training.

Fortunately this model is still partially used for some careers like medicine and veterinary practices where you have a mandatory internship of at least a year before you can be admitted as a practicing GP or Vet.

I've done an apprenticeship in IT and CS, the first two years of it felt more intense than my 4 years of university education. We used to have waves of exams every 6 weeks for the first year. Then on the second, every 8/12. Was crazy but it was thrilling. 16yo me was incredibly happy to have gone to trade school instead of high school.

Wish I practiced programming more than just trying to understand the perfect way to code or theories behind. Such a waste of time :(

FWIW, this is exactly how you learn craftsmanship professions in Germany today. You become a apprentice of a Master for 3 years and learn as you work together, alongside theoretical learning.

> Human beings, it appears, are nearly unique in the animal world for being able to learn something by watching somebody else do it.

This is just blatantly wrong. If nothing else I myself have shown dogs how to solve problems, but here's a link to Wikipedia for good measure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_learning_in_animals

Honestly, it's not worth your time, a lot of presumptions, false premises and incomplete hypothesis. Also, apprenticeship didn't disappear, it's still very much in use in many countries. The focus is just different. Classroom education allows a plethora of secondary skills to be trained without the pressure of performance. For some, it's essential.

compulsory education is a main pillar of the twisted power structure in our society.

power in society comes from a knowledge gap, and powerful people have all the incentives to sustain it. consequently education is a battleground, and we, the honest people, have pretty much lost the battles for about a century now.

the OP only makes sense when also considering this aspect of the question.

School teaches you about things; apprenticeships teach you to do things. Huge difference.

He's right, but it has been known for decades that learning by doing is the most efficient way of learning. The reason it is not panacea is because it is hard to measure. A test is easier to administer than reviewing source code to determine whether someone can build web sites well. Learning by doing also requires more freer forms of education, hence it is resisted by Conservative politicians who'd rather have the students learn more discipline (i.e., if you aren't suffering you aren't working hard).

Moreover, a country that emphasizes learning by doing over education focused on test taking will likely score worse on international student assessments, such as PISA. For the simple reason that if students are better at doing their own research, writing reports, etc., they are probably also worse at test taking.

There's too much paranoia and prestige involved in education. It would be better if education was based on the science of education, rather than the whims of politicians, but it's not... it's like the prerogative to control the young generation is too important to let people like "professors in pedagogy" decide. Cause what the fuck do they know? I was a kid once and I learned things in school, kids these days suck, yadda, yadda.

The author constructs a straw man in a simplified universe that is utterly unrealistic and then proceeds to defeat this straw man. Most real teaching is not done as it is described in the text. That is why there is nothing readworthy in it. It is probably a hidden form of marketing to buy the books they are selling.

I like that we talk about practice, and we need to add this to our learning. Even more now, when apprenticeships are a dying practice and everyone is vibe-working.

But dismissing theories, and just saying “most theories are wrong, anyway” smells too strongly of anti-intellectualism, and it just rubs me in the wrong way. I don't like this trend at all.

Theory is as important as practice. The two depend on each other.

Simply put, the author doesn't know what he's talking about.

This nostalgia for the "good old days" should have a name.

This comparison of "medieval learning" and "modern learning" is tougher than "Wilt Chamberlain" versus "Michael Jordan." The amount of knowledge and usage of high abstractions is incomparable. Imagine what we've learned in the last 500 years, and then forget it all and teach children that. They'll finish school in one year.

If your goal is to create a capable laborer for a specific job that won't change in their lifetime, apprenticeships are the way to go. However, if your goal is to teach a person many abstract ideas not specifically related to a particular job, it won't work.

3. It's a popular idea to teach with real-world examples and learn by doing ("general abstractions" vs. "hyperspecific things," "do and watch" vs. "study"). But how many things that you study in school can you touch or do? If you throw away the last 500 years, then yes, what's left you can definitely touch. For example, the author refers to "economic reasoning." Okay, let's create a real-world example and have the student either do it or watch how someone else does it. Hard, right?

4. We can actually use "real-world examples" and "do and watch" for almost anything students are learning. For example, we could go with the class to a nuclear power plant and 'do and watch' there. There are two issues: many things will not be allowed for students, and it would take years to finish just one year of school. We may call not using it "an embarrassment," but there is a reason for it.

5. "Human beings, it appears, are nearly unique in the animal world for being able to learn something by watching somebody else do it." This is simply not true.

6. "It’s often not so important to understand the reasons why you should do something as it is to see it being performed correctly." We do so much of this in real life unintentionally. Imagine a world where we do it intentionally. What would happen if things changes faster and faster? Who would pay all of these "real-world example" learners during their transition?

7. "Most theories are wrong anyway." You may read this and skip the other parts.

8. He got the pyramid model wrong. Putting a base first doesn't mean learning all of math first, then physics, then chemistry, then biology. A biology base may be about the differences and similarities of animals and plants, and the types of animals.

9. "...this must mean we have an ironclad theory of how scientific knowledge is produced. Except we don’t." Yes, we actually have a scientific method. He probably couldn't "do and watch" it, so it fell out of his sight.