Schooling and Learning: The Way It Is

We know from sources like Plato, Confucius and the Old Testament that the idea of schooling is about 2500 years old. The purpose of this page of the blog is to define and describe schooling and to explain its benefits and impediments for learning.

I would like to begin by offering a list of foundational ideas I believe to be true:

• The learner, not the teacher or parent, is ultimately in control of learning.
• Schooling is society’s effort to control learning.  Any kind of schooling includes a curriculum  and a teacher. Attending schools requires a learner to grant some control over learning to others.
• The success of schooling depends on the quality of the curriculum and instruction and the nature of the tension between the school’s and the learner’s timeline for learning.
• Teachers never have absolute control over learning. The best teachers understand their lack of control and find ways to share their authority with their students. They manage the tension between their timeline for learning and the learner’s individual timeline. They find ways to make the tension between timelines a source of motivation rather than intimidation.
•  Each person’s unique biology provides a general timeline for learning. Whether the learner is a five-year-old in kindergarten or an adult enrolled in an online course on electrical circuits, he has to submit to someone else’s curriculum goals and instructional philosophy. The five-year-old’s brain, eyes and fingers may not be ready to benefit from reading instruction. The adult’s learning skills may not be ready for the abstractness of electrical circuits.
• Opportunity to learn influences the timeline for learning. Parents and teachers have some control of learning related opportunities. 
• Interaction with other students influences the timeline for learning. Because of compulsory education laws, modern schooling has limited control over interaction among students. Attendance is not optional for students. Students far out-number teachers in schools. Interaction with other students can have negative effects on learning.
• We know far more about the human timeline for learning than we know about how learning actually occurs. We can easily observe and study the human behaviors that indicate the timeline for learning, but even neuroscientists have only a crude ability to study the brain's capacity and mechanics for learning. Theories of learning only express metaphorical how learning might occur.