The human mind is about connections (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24099851/)

Education vs. mental development (part 1)

Theo Dawson

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When I was a child, most of my learning experiences were positive. I rarely had difficulty understanding course content and generally found school subjects interesting. In fact, I found most of them so interesting that I did a bunch of geeky things like asking way too many questions, reading anything I could get my hands on (including encyclopedias and dictionaries), spending Saturday mornings in the local library (for fun), and conducting research (such as breeding mice, keeping pet snakes and lizards, and collecting iron shavings from sandbox sand to study magnetism). I did not know these things were geeky, and I did not realize I was bright. This is at least partly because the only thing I was truly bad at (hated?) was memorization. My inability (unwillingness?) to memorize had enough of a negative effect on my GPA for my intelligence to seem unremarkable to my teachers and family.

It was a long time before I understood what a lucky child I had been. Because I was in my intellectual sweet spot (Goldilocks Zone) all the way through school, it was relatively easy for me to put what I was learning into practice. I now know that all of that practice was recruiting my brain’s inborn learning mechanisms, keeping me addicted to learning, endowing me with an earned sense of competence, and allowing me to grow a very effective mind.

An earned sense of competence results from frequently repeated opportunities to build skills through relevant real-world practice. It grows best when we are interested in what we’re doing and succeed just often enough to learn that if we try hard enough, we are likely to be rewarded with delicious success.

School worked for me because my slightly-above-average polymath mind was almost always ready for the material on offer. In other words, I was ready to comprehend what I was being taught, connect it to what I already knew, put it to use, and wonder about what might come next. Most of the time, I was learning in my sweet spot.

The problem is…

Most of us aren’t as lucky as I was. Today’s schools typically group children together by age. This means that most 5-year-olds are in kindergarten, most 6-year-olds are in 1st grade, etcetera. Children in kindergarten are expected to learn the content presented in kindergarten. Children in the first grade are expected to learn the content presented in the first grade, etc. This pattern pretty much holds true until college.

Most people accept this arrangement without question. Indeed, it seems tidy, sensible, and fair—but only if you believe that all children are equally capable. If, on the other hand, you are aware that in an average classroom, students’ capabilities typically span a 5–7 year developmental range, it doesn’t seem tidy, sensible, or fair at all.

This 5–7 year range is a pattern that Lectica has observed in many dozens of classrooms over the last 30 years. There is no doubt about it, age is a completely inadequate and unfair sorting mechanism for any educational system that expects all children of a given age to learn exactly the same content.

Based on research involving more than 40,000 students, we estimate that only 15%–20% of students in an average classroom are a good mental fit for the course content. This means that only 15 to 20 percent of our children are being offered the opportunity to learn the way I did—in the Goldilocks zone. Other students—the highly academically gifted, less academically gifted, and constitutionally disadvantaged—either tune out (common among the more academically gifted and less academically gifted alike) or spend most of their learning time memorizing.

It’s pretty obvious that tuning out during childhood and adolescence is not a good thing. Alienated children become alienated adults. Poorly educated and alienated children become poorly educated and alienated adults. Need I say that this is as bad for society as it is for our children?

Although its obvious that tuning out is not a good thing, it may not be as obvious that memorizing is not a good thing. In fact, most of us think of intelligence as the ability to remember—consider Jeopardy, Schools Match Wits, spelling bees, and standardized tests. However, if we reframe intelligence as the ability to engage skillfully with the world around us, skills for remembering must take a seat alongside several other critical skills—including real-world interpersonal, self-regulation, reasoning, learning, reading, writing, and math skills, and a lengthy list of basic life and occupational skills.

What’s so bad about memorizing?

Let’s take a look at an example that illustrates the difference between memorizing and learning through practice.

You may be aware of a memorizing tool called a “Memory Palace.” Using this tool involves putting things you’re trying to memorize into special locations in an imagined palace, thus creating a connection between the thing you want to remember and another mental concept. It works as a memorizing device because we remember better when we make connections between ideas. In the Memory Palace example, when we want to retrieve memorized material, we mentally navigate to its storage place in our Memory Palace. For example, if you stored a mathematical formula in a pink box on the left side of the fireplace in the ballroom, you could mentally return to that place whenever you needed to retrieve the formula.

The downside of this kind of remembering is that it’s shallow and arbitrary. The storage site has nothing to do with the formula aside from the fact it is stored there. In other words, the benefits are limited to the retrieval of memorized content.

In contrast, people who learn by putting what they are learning into practice connect new knowledge to existing knowledge in non-arbitrary, inherently meaningful ways—and they rarely make a single connection. Instead, they make multiple connections that include senses, emotions, and ideas. Remembering is not about retrieving a specific piece of information, it’s about activating a network of related ideas, emotions, and sensations. A formula learned in this way isn’t just a formula retrieved for a test question, it’s a set of ideas that work together to make the formula so well understood that it’s usable in a variety of contexts. We say that knowledge of this kind is embodied. People who learn in this way not only remember formulas, they continually deepen their appreciation of these formulas’ logic, meanings, value, and relation to one another.

Here is what real learning looks like:

Embodied knowledge offers much more than the ability to retrieve a correct answer, it allows us to weave memories, concepts, facts, ideas, sensations, and emotions into useful and meaningful actions, interactions, narratives, and questions in response to cues from our environment.

For children to develop robustly, their minds must be allowed to grow in a way that lays down a rich and varied network of mental connections. Mental networks of this kind provide a solid foundation for future growth by creating a continually increasing number of places where knowledge gleaned from new experiences can be plugged in meaningfully.

It’s time to ensure that all children have the opportunity to realize their developmental potential. My colleagues and I have been working toward making this possible for 30 years. I’ll share the latest advances in Part 2.

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Theo Dawson
Theo Dawson

Written by Theo Dawson

Award-winning educator, scholar, & consultant, Dr. Theo Dawson, discusses a wide range of topics related to learning and development.

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