A little insight on Practicing WHAT WE Preach!

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How We Learn
January 16, 2005
By ALISON GOPNIK


So here's the big question: if children who don't even go
to school learn so easily, why do children who go to school
seem to have such a hard time? Why can children solve
problems that challenge computers but stumble on a
third-grade reading test?

When we talk about learning, we really mean two quite
different things, the process of discovery and of mastering
what one discovers. All children are naturally driven to
create an accurate picture of the world and, with the help
of adults to use that picture to make predictions,
formulate explanations, imagine alternatives and design
plans. Call it ''guided discovery.''

If this kind of learning is what we have in mind then one
answer to the big question is that schools don't teach the
same way children learn. As in the gear-and-switch
experiments, children seem to learn best when they can
explore the world and interact with expert adults.

For example, Barbara Rogoff, professor of psychology at the
University of California at Santa Cruz, studied children
growing up in poor Guatemalan Indian villages. The
youngsters gradually mastered complex skills like preparing
tortillas from scratch, beginning with the 2-year-old
mimicking the flattening of dough to the 10-year-old
entrusted with the entire task. They learned by watching
adults, trying themselves and receiving detailed corrective
feedback about their efforts. Mothers did a careful
analysis of what the child was capable of before
encouraging the next step.

This may sound like a touchy-feely progressive
prescription. But a good example of such teaching in our
culture is the stern but beloved baseball coach. How many
school teachers are as good at essay writing, science or
mathematics as the average coach is at baseball? And even
when teachers are expert, how many children ever get to
watch them work through writing an essay or designing a
scientific experiment or solving an unfamiliar math
problem?

Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught
in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get
lectures about the history of the World Series. High school
students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the
past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until
graduate school.

But there is another side to the question.

In guided discovery -- figuring out how the world works or unraveling
the structure of making tortillas -- children learn to
solve new problems. But what is expected in school, at
least in part, involves a very different process: call it
''routinized learning.'' Something already learned is made
to be second nature, so as to perform a skill effortlessly
and quickly.

The two modes of learning seem to involve different
underlying mechanisms and even different brain regions, and
the ability to do them develops at different stages.

Babies are as good at discovery as the smartest adult -- or
better. But routinized learning evolves later. There may
even be brain changes that help.

There are also tradeoffs: Children seem to learn new things more easily than adults.
But especially through the school-age years, knowledge
becomes more and more engrained and automatic. For that
reason, it also becomes harder to change. In a sense,
routinized learning is less about getting smarter than
getting stupider: it's about perfecting mindless
procedures. This frees attention and thought for new
discoveries.

The activities that promote mastery may be different from
the activities that promote discovery. What makes knowledge
automatic is what gets you to Carnegie Hall -- practice,
practice, practice. In some settings, like the Guatemalan
village, this happens naturally: make tortillas every day
and you'll get good at it. In our culture, children rich
and poor grow highly skilled at video games they play for
hours.

But in school we need to acquire unnatural skills like
reading and writing. These are meaningless in themselves.
There is no intrinsic discovery in learning artificial
mapping between visual symbols and sounds, and in the
natural environment no one would ever think of looking for
that sort of mapping. On the other hand, mastering these
skills is absolutely necessary, allowing us to exercise our
abilities for discovery in a wider world.

The problem for many children in elementary school may not
be that they're not smart enough but that they're not
stupid enough. They haven't yet been able to make reading
and writing transparent and automatic. This is particularly
true for children who don't have natural opportunities to
practice these skills, learning in chaotic and impoverished
schools and leading chaotic and impoverished lives.

But routinized learning is not an end in itself. A good
coach may well make his players throw the ball to first
base 50 times or swing again and again in the batting cage.
That will help, but by itself it won't make a strong
player. The game itself -- reacting to different pitches,
strategizing about base running -- requires thought,
flexibility and inventiveness.

Children would never tolerate baseball if all they did was
practice. No coach would evaluate a child, and no society
would evaluate a coach, based on performance in the batting
cage. What makes for learning is the right balance of both
learning processes, allowing children to retain their
native brilliance as they grow up.


Alison Gopnik is co-author of ''The Scientist in the Crib''
and professor of psychology at the University of California
at Berkeley.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/education/edlife/EDSCIENCE.html?ex=1106973113&ei=1&en=5e14c718e2b159eb