Contemporary education (CE) assumes that a person’s ability to learn (‘intelligence’) is determined from birth and that the business of education is to tap this in-born talent by encouraging the person to learn. This is done by providing objects of learning (geography, Spanish, mathematics) and a context in which these objects can be embedded.
Contemporary education is summarised in equation 1.
Equation 1: Intelligence multiplied by effort equals success.
Two consequences of this view are that
a) It is not worthwhile teaching people how to learn better.
b) Many people are too stupid to learn.
This type of education is occasionally and eventually successful, but it achieves its effect by a hopeful process of trial and error: after enough exposure, with the aid of lots of encouragement and the gift of some natural spark, you gradually get hold of a topic or a grammatical construction or whatever else you are trying to learn.
This is characterised by an efficiency of 2%. (See 'The current state of education')
At the 2nd annual conference of the ‘Acadamee’, which took place on the island of Colonsay in the Scottish Hebrides, a group of enthusiasts from diverse cultural, professional and academic backgrounds gathered to analyze quantitatively the effectiveness of current education.
First, they established the maximum rate of learning possible: in theoretically ideal conditions for the perfect student of normal intelligence. This rate of learning was given the score of 100%. The Acadamee then looked to the examples of the best western schools and universities and calculated scores for the rates of learning commonly found in these environments.
It was seen that the average level of efficiency of learning was at 2% of the ideal. Some of the best universities were found to achieve 8-10% efficiency, though this was found to be the case for only a small minority of students. Many schools were found to be operating at a level of efficiency below the 1% mark.
The chairman of the committee concluded in her report that this situation was ‘unacceptable’. She wrote that ‘…(that which)…is particularly striking about these analyses is that the poverty of performance that is revealed goes unacknowledged: as if gross educational incompetence were an unavoidable fact of life…’.
In conclusion, it was noted that ‘something should be done’.
20th century psychology became dominated by the metaphor of the computer, with the brain being seen as an input-output system entirely independent of the body. The mind was seen as being something which ‘manipulated symbols’
and perception and action were treated as separate from and irrelevant to thinking.
The problem with this view was not just that it wasn’t true to how humans actually work, but that it blinded scientists and educationalists to how you could improve the mind. You can’t make your PC run better by have it practice certain enjoyable exercises. PC’s never get any faster or slower than the speed of their inbuilt, unalterable processors.
Many scientists (criminally, in our view) began to think the same thing of the human brain-treating it as unalterable hardware. The job of the educator became (and to an appalling extent remains) feeding information and opinions into this box we call the brain.
Fortunately, a different paradigm has begun to emerge of late, under the banner of Embodied Cognition. By taking seriously how humans work rather than how PC’s tell us they should, this movement has been able to take seriously a much wider range of data and integrate it into a very different picture of what a human is.
Here are some of the common claims of Embodied Cognition:
That perception and action are inextricably linked.
That memory is something you do, an almost perceptual process.
That understanding is a special case of being able to creatively imagine, a kind of embodied simulation that depends on real-world experience.
That the brain is hardware and software, input and output, all rolled into one.
We have been drawing out the educational consequences of this rich and inclusive view of human cognition to put together courses that will transform your learning experiences for life.
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