Who Cares…?
A Learners’ View (ALV) Is Of The Shortest And Fastest Path To Learning, The Oxygen Of Social Life.
Q: Who cares about Classic Education: A Learners’ View (ALV)?
Ima Learner: Great teachers care. Bottom line, educators and others who try to make sure that learners today learn what the most informed people in society know and do, including in the 21st century. This site contains descriptions of how that goal is reachable now with existing resources through public and private schooling.
Q:’ Classic Education are about yesterday, not today or tomorrow. Who cares?
Ima Learner: What people do to learn today appears consistent with what people have done during recorded history, yes even before video games. Classic Education consists of descriptions of steps people use to learn what the most informed people know to do. This site brings together a learners’ view (ALV) of learning, the descriptions of ways people have shown experimental empirical behavioral and social scientists what they do while they learn.
People care who want to learn more and learn it faster. So do people who try to help others learn more and faster. That includes learners of all ages, their teachers and others who provide human, economic, political, and religious services related to learning in and out of schools.
Developers of education software and hardware products have a growing interest in how people learn. Classic Education has protocols for learning that software developers can code.
This site describes samples of essential social patterns people use to learn classic and contemporary subjects. Scientists have demonstrated these essentials. People use these patterns to learn irrespective of the quality or quantity of instruction. Instruction that uses these essentials allows learning to occur.
Developers of education software can represent as programming code the necessary social patterns people use while learning. They can also write software to increase the amount and rates of learning promptly and dramatically.
Some developers have taken their lead from classic and experimental education over the past century. Software prototypes exist that demonstrate use of these patterns.
Most human learning has occurred outside of schools without formal instruction for most people yesterday, today, and likely tomorrow. Software based on the way people learn will permit them to learn more and faster at times of their choosing with and without schools.
Q: You miss my point. A classic education is old stuff. Even the term doesn’t speak to me or anyone I know. It doesn’t speak to students today.
Ima Learner: People know what they know. To the extent that knowing is useful, they can’t know what options in life they’re missing, if they don’t know what the most informed people know about these options. People may think they know. A classic education gives them a way to compare their opinion against what the most informed people know.
Q: That begs the question, why, for example, should a person with a non-English first language living in a low income family in an urban area care about Aristotle, Beowolf and other so called classics? The world’s changing too fast to spend time with yesterday.
Ima Learner: Yes, many people accept that premise. It may seem a fair point to them.
At the same time, other people earn a classic education, including some from the conditions you describe. They argue that a classic education provides a longer database for understanding how people across the world are arriving at such a fast pace, optional benefits the pace offers, and more ways to handle challenges that may otherwise block those options.
A tension has existed between these two positions throughout recorded history.
This site addresses both positions by distinguishing between how people learn and the content or subject matter they learn. This site offers an introduction to social patterns people use to learn a classic or another named education. Those concerned with learning more and learning it faster can use this site as a guide for learning content of their choice more efficiently.
Q: Why bring up efficiency? That’s a red herring from economics. Who cares about efficiency? Learning is individualized and sometimes messy, yes? People learn at their own rate.
Ima Learner: Yes, each person can appear to learn at his or her own rate. Yet, behavioral scientists show that a change in instruction can change the rate of learning by individuals and aggregates of people.
Classic Education: A Learners’ View (ALV) 0f Choices during Teaching-Learning offers examples of which changes in instruction most likely change rates of learning.
As to the efficiency of learning, it’s part of discussing how people learn. ALV offers ways that behavioral and social scientists have described for individuals and groups to learn more and to learn it faster. That’s efficiency.
Q: Classic education is elitist. That’s one way people learn to act like know-it-alls. I want to know how most people learn as in public schools and in training for real world work.
Ima Learner: Classic education offers content that has continued throughout recorded history. This is what the most informed people in a civilization know and do. People who attend public, charter, and private schools can, and some do earn a classic education, as do many school dropouts who read extensively on their own.
All people use the same observable patterns to learn whether all or a part of a classic eduation.
Learners meet lesson criteria in schools as well as in other settings in ways described in Classic Education.
Q: Are you arguing that students in low academic performing schools will learn more and faster with a classic education? That’s preposterous. That’s old thinking that doesn’t address 21st Century realities that require cooperation and collaboration to solve complex problems.
Ima Learner: I used to say those things too. Many educators say them. The points have some validity, but are incomplete.
Behavioral and social scientists have demonstrated principles of essential behavior patterns people use while learning. For example, people learn one person at a time. To do so, each person uses what they know to learn more. They do easy before hard tasks. They first solve simple problems that together solve complex problems.
This is the same process for each person whether earning a classic or other named education, whether for example, listening to a lecture, reading alone, talking in a group, or hunting for food in a wilderness.
This site describes details of these priniciples and examples of instruction that uses them.
Q: What about artistic expression, creativity, acquiring knowledge, conceptualization, memory, reasoning, higher order thinking and problem solving, intelligence, how the brain works, emoting, passion, and such things? Where do they fit into classic education? They must be important. So many people spend time and money talking about them. Yes?
Ima Learner Yes, they have importance for some purposes. Sometimes such things appear to have profound influences on the human condition.
Yet, they all rely on behavior patterns of people to demonstrate the existence of such things.
This site includes descriptions of those patterns without reference to how others may infer something else.
Q: What about decision trees, game theory, Artifical Intelligence, expert systems, analogies, and algorithms? Where do they fit into classic education? They’re more recent developments than classic education, right?
Ima Learner: That depends on how you define a classic education. These practices and theories demonstrate two points that Classic Education addresses.
First, developers (including by some behavioral and social scientists) of the tools you named extended and adjusted selected parts of classic education to make these tools. Arguably, they have extended what constitutes a classic education into the 21st century.
Second, some of these scientists have used these tools to describe how people learn and to try to mimic those processes with electronics.
Classic Education relies on such tools to describe social action patterns people use to learn. It also uses these tools to increase rates people learn.
Q: What about learning as divine creation, divine inspiration, divine intervention, prayer, meditation, predestination, God’s will, and miracles? People have always relied on them to know how to live. They must be part of classic education and learning, yes? And, behavior patterns can’t possibly account for all learning, unless those who describe learning claim omniscience, right?
Ima Learner: Yes, the content of what people with a classic education learn includes descriptions of such phenomena. And, yes, many people believe that such descriptions account for changes in behavior patterns.
Classic Education describes the process of learning as changes in observable behavior patterns. It does not use the vocabulary of faith and belief in order to describe and explain why behavior patterns exist or change.
This site also does not rely on or require assumptions, claims, or beliefs that support or deny the existence other explanations of how people learn.
Q: Does Classic Education include any non- or extra-sensory explanations of learning?
Ima Learner: This site identifies learning as behavioral scientists describe it. Behavioral scientists do not rely on non- or extra-sensory explanations to obtain their descriptioins.
They use results of experimental empirical studies to write these descriptions. In this way, others may replicate and compare their results with how others describe the learning process.
Scientists also calculate the likelihood of variations of social patterns people use to learn without relying on explanations other than observable through sensory input.
Q: Why did you write a caution about reading Classic Education?
Ima Learner: Classic Education consists of descriptions of learning. It does not fit the standard discussion about education. Writers of this site want to point out the difference up front.
They describe in neutral terms how people learn as reported by empirical experimental behavioral and social scientists. Some people accept and use these descriptions to increase learning in and out of schools. Other people do not use them intentionally. Those who do not use them give a variety of reasons.
Empirical scientists, including behaviorists, economists, and sociologists, use a specific paradigm, an organization of assumptions, based on the premise that if it exists, they can observe, count/measure, and manage it. If they cannot observe it directly, it does not exist. Then they use their observations to increase or decrease learning of individuals and groups.
Non-empirical scientists use other paradigms. Writers of Classic Education have noted that non-empirical scientists frequently refer to personal, theological, political, and career reasons for not using empirical science descriptions. Their objections range from that’s mechanical, not meaningful; to that’s old Prussian school; to I don’t like to treat people in mechanical ways; to that’s demeaning; to I’m a professional, I’m doing my best, and I like doing what I’m doing; to I’m trying, just help me do more of what I say is best; etc.
Analysts of learning can use the principles described in Classic Education to assess the efficiency of learning with lessons based on non-experimental paradigms.
Also, Classic Education exists through a wiki platform. The CAUTION calls attention to implications of that platform.
As such, Classic Education evolves through editing and posting new and editing existing descriptions of how people learn. Behavioral scientists who study how people learn refine their descriptions. Writers of Classic Education then refine the content of the site.
Q: Do you mean to say that a teacher can decrease another student’s learning? So you limit learning? If so, that’s not good and that teacher should be fired when found out!
Ima Learner: Yes. Based on what behavioral scientists have described about how people learn, educators appear to limit how much students learn every day and probably in almost all public schools today.
Classic Education describes examples of how other educators increase student learning by matching instruction to generic behavior patterns people use to learn. Those who do not do the same are likely to limit the amount and rate at which students learn. These facts have been in the professional education and behavioral psychology literature for more than half a century.
Q: I don’t understand. And, I don’t believe you or in classic education. Convince me.
Ima Learner: Classic Education describes one part of what exists in a classic education, specifically, essential behavior patterns people use to learn.
It is what it is: available to those who choose to use it.
It includes descriptions of results from empirical experimental behavioral research studies of how people learn. It illustrates how some people use these principles and how others may. It does not try to persuade anyone to believe or do anything.
Taken together, it offers examples of ways to increase learning promptly and dramatically.
It provides patterns that developers of electronic tools may code in order to increase learning promptly and dramatically.
Let us know what refinements will help you to increase learning for yourself as well as others.
Q: You’re serious. You say that I’m lazy or a bum or something else without value if I don’t learn a classic education, because I can earn one if I try. And I’m a working adult and a parent who’s a teacher. Why should I take the blame for what schools did to me? I resent the inference.
Ima Learner: Great teachers use a learners’ view even if they haven’t heard those words used as in Classic Education. They use, on purpose or by chance, principles and elements of learning to make their lessons result in learning.
If you’re like us, you’ve probably been waiting for the right moment to explore principles of learning. And, you wonder why, if ALV is so important, you haven’t heard much about it before?
You’ve already made an extensive investment in learning about learning and education. You wonder why your mentors didn’t at least introduce observable principles of learning as part of that investment?
It may surprise you that evidence for ALV indicates that learning is, at least in part, an essential set of mechanical processes. It follows that the art of teaching relies on these mechanics as well as the way you package them with instruction and the content of your lessons.
You might find yourself worried that learning to use ALV will take a lot of time away from your tight schedule as well as crimp your creativity and that of learners. The opposite is true. Student creativity is enhanced when teachers provide explicit instructions used as the backbone to great lessons.
We, like uncounted thousands of others, have learned that the use of ALV as a code for planning and instructing lessons lets us downsize and simplify whatever we do to increase and document learning. That means, for example, we use fewer words in a lesson than without attending to ALV in order to increase rates of learning and to reduce the likelihood of failure through the lesson.
We offer Classic Education as a source for you to use in order to increase that learning promptly. It’s our way of symbolically lifting you onto our shoulders, so you may see further ahead than we can see. We expect you to share too.
In so doing, we will both join a chain of uncounted generations of learners that probably started using principles of learning before recorded memory of anyone describing them. We see no reason more important than continuing that ancient and precious process that scientists have been documenting. [Tip] [Read More] [Q & A]
[edit] Related Reading
- Caution
- Meet Ima Learner, a new member of your classroom
- Decisive Schools
- New Era School Initiative (NESI)
- Interviews and Conversations
[edit] Related Resources
- We have temporarily disabled the website EduClassics.com. We moved relevant pages to Classic Education: A Learners’ View (ALV).
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Table of Contents for CLASSIC EDUCATION: A Learners’ View (ALV)
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