Ten Fundamental Truths About Learning William A. Reinsmith 1. Learning first takes place through osmosis.

Before anything else it is a process of unconscious immersion in ones immediate environment. Learning starts with the earliest ray of sensitivity to surroundings; it probably begins in the womb. By the time children reach school they have absorbed a tremendous amount. In fact, they have achieved the greatest feat of learning: essential mastery of a spoken language. Though school learning is more formal and conscious, the osmotic process still goes on. And educators we should never forget this. 2. Authentic learning comes through trial and error. No trial and error, no experimentation, and then no real learning. The learner needs to fool with things, to try them on, to adjust and readjust. This is true whether dealing with concrete skills or with conceptualizing. The fit will come eventually since our minds are by nature meaning-oriented. Teachers on every level need to create environments that allow for this trial and error process. Otherwise learning, at best, will consist of memory and recall. 3. Students will learn only what they have some proclivity for or interest in. Find out what a person likes, and then help him build around it. Once interest exists learning is possible, and teaching kicks in We waste enormous quantities of time (and money) giving students learning tasks for which they have no interest or readiness, boring them and frustrating ourselves in the process. This is one of the tragic defects of mass education. 4. No one will formally learn something unless he/she believes he/she can learn it. A large part of preliminary teaching has to do with helping the learner come to believe through a process of affirmation and reaffirmation. At the same time this should not be overdone; students should gently be urged to look inside themselves where the real teacher and affirmer live. Once students genuinely believe they have the ability to learn something, the teacher need only create learning opportunities (a huge task in itself). Students with both curiosity and belief will be self-propelled. Let them learn. Stay out of the way. Heidegger has stated it very well: To be a teacher is, above all, to let others learn. 5. Learning cannot take place outside an appropriate context. No one learns in a vacuum. Isolated learning does not exist, but is rather part of a universe of discourse, an interlocking network of connections. An appropriate context taps the learner into those connections. Quite often perhaps far more often than we can afford to admit the classroom is an inappropriate context for genuine learning. At the very least, we should try to make our classrooms vibrate like a crossroads where powerful ideas intersect. Too often, especially in universities, classrooms are more like free standing islands alone and aloof, reflecting the hyperspecialization of our various disciplines. But education, as Michael Oakescott has rightly observed, has more to do with conversation than with isolated bodies of information or fact. To converse is to connect and immerse oneself as part of an ongoing flow. Only appropriate contexts can allow such immersion to occur. 6. Real learning connotes use. If something isnt going to be immediately used or applied in some manner it wont get learned. Initial learning will abort and be erased unless extended and reinforced in some practical way. At the very least, the conditions in which learning can be used should be simulated. (Colleges attempt to do this in science course labs.) Knowing and action work in tandem. Telling students they will use or need something later on, even though it has no immediate value, is a waste of time. It will not be learned which is the reason why professors in subsequent courses, a year or two down the road, find they need to reteach what they assumed their students knew. Students havent forgotten the material as the professor thinks; they simply never learned it because no follow through took place. Taking this truth seriously would very likely entail the abandonment of most college curricula as they presently stand. 1

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Observations or insights taken in and temporarily forgotten (perhaps not even fully understood), may be remembered later on when life experience makes them relevant, but skill learning does not work this way. No one knows how a learner moves from imitation to intrinsic ownership, from external modeling to internalization and competence. But it happens and its the one process no one can teach. A teacher can only try to assist it by setting up to the conditions for it and trying to act as a catalyst. But the actual crossover is mysterious. So too, in large sense, it is difficult to understand how one moves successfully from the unknown to the known. In strictly logical terms it should be impossible. Socrates, long ago, defined the problem in responding to Meno. I know, Meno, what you mean, but just see what a tiresome dispute you are introducing. You argue that a man cannot inquire either about that which he knows or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to inquire, and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very subject about which he is to inquire. Yet students do move into the unknown and come to know. This process is at the very core of learning. To date, we know very little about how it works. Thus, what is really important in learning cant be taught. We should simple admit this. The more learning is like play, the more absorbing it will be unless the student has been so corrupted by institutional education that only dull serious work is equated with learning . In this case, the introduction of playfulness will appear as fun, but not connected with true learning. It is frightening how hard a teacher must work to convince todays college students that study and learning can be interesting even joyful activities. More often than not, students greet that idea with incomprehension or at best with mild fascination. For authentic learning to happen time should occasionally be wasted, tangent pursued, sideshoots followed up. Some of the greatest discoveries have been made through serendipity. So, too, learning moments are occasionally stumbled upon inadvertently. A teacher should feast on these, follow their flow, be humble before them. It often happens that what really gets learned is different from what the teacher had in mind an experience both baffling and intriguing. But little can be done about it except to teach for surprise. Teachers who structure too tightly where they think the learners mind should go may be involved in conditioning, rather than learning. Tests are a very poor indicator of whether an individual has really learned something. The main reason for this is that, except for disciplines which are extremely abstract and theoretical, tests provide an artificial context for demonstrating ones knowledge. They seldom address the real world. By the same token, wrong or misguided answers are far more revealing than correct ones. A teacher who follows up why a student answered the way she did may learn something valuable about that students mind, as well as the context in which that mind functions.

All of these interconnected truths are general enough to apply to learning of any kind. They are so basic and obvious that one may wonder why they need to be stated at all. Our greatest educators have espoused them in some manner during the course of Western history. Yet is the simple and obvious that we tend to overlook when discussing or recommending educational change. We often engage in educational activity as if these truths didnt exist and then wonder why we fail to engender learning in our students. In any profession ignorance of its elemental laws will lead to shoddy, even disastrous, results. Perhaps a large part of the reason we educate so poorly is that we fail to observe and work within the fundamental principles of our craft, so we dont create environments in which they can be applied. Successful teaching can ensue only where the fundamental truths of learning are both observed and respected. Periodically, teachers on all levels need to return to those basic truths however mysterious they may be and reflect on them at length.