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THINKING ABOUT EDUCATION SERIES FIFTH EDITION

Jonas F. Soltis, Editor

The revised and expanded Fifth Edition of this series builds on the strengths of the previous editions. Written in a clear and concise style, these books speak directly to preservice and in-service teachers. Each offers useful interpretive categories and thought-provoking insights into daily practice in schools. Numerous case studies provide a needed bridge between theory and practice. Basic philosophical perspectives on teaching, learning, curriculum, ethics, and the relation of school to society are made readily accessible to the reader.

PERSPECTIVES ON LEARNING D. C. Phillips and Jonas F. Soltis

THE ETHICS OF TEACHING Kenneth A. Strike and Jonas F. Soltis

CURRICULUM AND AIMS Decker F. Walker and Jonas F. Soltis

SCHOOL AND SOCIETY Walter Feinberg and Jonas F. Soltis

APPROACHES TO TEACHING Gary D Fenstermacher and Jonas F. Soltis

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THINKING ABOUT EDUCATION SERIES

5TH EDITION

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PERSPECTIVES ON LEARNING D. C. PHILLIPS

JONAS F. SOLTIS

Teachers College Columbia University New York and London

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Published by Teachers College Press, 1234 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027

Copyright © 2009 by Teachers College, Columbia University All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Phillips, D. C. (Denis Charles), 1938-

Perspectives on learning / D. C. Phillips, Jonas F. Soltis. — 5th ed. p. cm. — (Thinking about education series)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-0-8077-4983-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Learning—Philosophy. I. Soltis, Jonas F. II.

Title.

LB1060.P48 2009 370.15’23–dc22

2009006147 ISBN: 978-0-8077-4983-8 (paper)

e-ISBN: 978-0-8077-7120-4

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Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note to the Instructor

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION

Learning

The Teacher’s Responsibility

The Variety of Theories

An Objection: We Don’t Need Theories, Just Common Sense

The Plan of the Book

Chapter 2 CLASSICAL THEORIES

Plato’s Theory of Learning

Case One

The Lockean Atomistic Model

Case Two

A Critique

Case Three

Chapter 3 BEHAVIORISM

Classical Conditioning

Operant Conditioning

Case One

B. F. Skinner

Strengths and Weaknesses

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Case Two

Chapter 4 PROBLEM SOLVING, INSIGHT, AND ACTIVITY

The Gestalt Approach

Case One

The Inquiring Organism

The Mind of the Learner

Chapter 5 PIAGETIAN STRUCTURES AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM

The Development of Cognitive Structures

The Principles of Construction

Case One

Some Critical Issues

Guidelines for Educators

Constructivist Approaches to Learning After Piaget

Chapter 6 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF LEARNING

Social Influences on the “Piagetian Child”

John Dewey

Case One

Vygotsky and Others

Case Two

Case Three

Situated Cognition and Legitimate Peripheral Participation in Communities of Practice

Culture and Learning

Chapter 7 COGNITIVE STRUCTURES AND DISCIPLINARY STRUCTURES

Maps and Organizers

An Exercise

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The Structure of Disciplines

Bruner, Schwab, and Hirst

An Evaluation

Chapter 8 TRANSFER OF LEARNING

Case One

Related Notions: Mental and Formal Discipline

Case Two

Further Clarifications and Examples

Case Three

Case Four: An Early Empirical Study

Where Do We Stand Today?

Chapter 9 THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE APPROACH

Models: Pros and Cons

The Heuristic Value for Researchers

The Heuristic Value for Teachers

Some Deficiencies of the Computer Model

Understanding, Meaning, and the “Chinese Room”

An Exercise

Case One: Benny’s Mathematics

Plato and the Mind

Chapter 10 ARGUMENTS AND ISSUES

The Relation of Learning Theory to Teaching

Different Kinds of Learning?

A Starting Place for Learning

Learning and Behavior Change

The Scientific Status of Gestalt and Behaviorist Theories

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Different Teaching-Learning Strategies

Teaching, Learning, and Stages of Development

Learning to Read

Learning Facts and Structures

Learning Responsibility

Learning Theory and Artificial Intelligence

Learning to Balance Chemical Equations

The Evaluation of Verbal and Skill Learning

Learning the Meaning of Adding

Learning Shakespeare

Culture and Learning

Individualized Learning

A Problem with Multiple Theories of Learning

References, Notes, and Further Reading

Annotated Bibliography

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Acknowledgments

As is the case with all books, this one owes much to those who have played a part in its production. Lee Shulman gave encouragement and agreed to use a draft of the first edition of the text in a course co-taught at Stanford with Denis Phillips. We are especially indebted to the students in that course for their constructive criticisms. Professor James Marshall of the University of Auckland carefully read and reacted to several draft chapters. Valerie Phillips and Frances Simon provided essential and much appreciated word-processing skills. For general research assistance that included copyediting, development of cases, and offering useful suggestions, we thank Karl Hostetler. For the second edition, we were guided by several thoughtful reviews of the earlier volume, and we were especially indebted to Kenneth Howe and Robert Floden. The substantial expansion of the discussion of social aspects of learning in the third edition owes much to what was learned from the “Symbolic Systems Seminar in Education” at Stanford over a period of about five years, and Rich Shavelson discussed some issues relevant to the revisions for the fourth and fifth editions. Finally, we thank the able and cooperative staff of TC Press for shepherding us through the various editions.

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A Note to the Instructor

This book is designed to be used in the education of teachers. We did not write for “teachers in training” because we believe teachers should be educated rather than trained. We invite the users of the book to think with us as colleagues about the complexities of human learning.

The book is organized so that it can be used in a number of ways to suit the purposes and style of the instructor. It can be used singularly as the primary text for a full course on its topic, as supplemental reading, or as a source for cases and dialogues to stimulate class discussions.

If this book is used as a text in a full course, a number of pedagogical options are available:

1. The first nine chapters can be treated as you would treat any text, and then the arguments and issues in Chapter 10 can be used to provide materials for class discussions for the remainder of the term. From our experience, a case or a dialogue can easily produce a good discussion that lasts thirty or more minutes.

2. We have found that doing a chapter and then spending one or two sessions discussing the cases and related dialogues is a very effective way to mix the theoretical with the practical. At the end of each of the first nine chapters and in Table 1 in Chapter 10 we have offered suggestions for additional cases, dialogues, and issues to be discussed as you proceed.

3. To either of the above approaches could be added your own or class- invented dialogues, debates, and puzzles that apply theory to practice or raise issues of personal concern.

If you have not taught using the case method before, the following suggestions may be of some help:

1. It is important to establish a good group climate for discussion in which individuals feel free to express their views openly without fear of ridicule and also feel free to challenge the honest views of others with reasonable arguments and genuine alternatives.

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2. Good group discussions are facilitated by asking students to read cases and sketch their answers to case problems before class so a discussion can start with some forethought and direction.

3. Pedagogically, as a discussion leader it is useful to summarize along the way, to help students see the ideas at issue, and to bring in relevant theoretical knowledge to guide discussions to some reason able conclusion, however firm or tentative.

4. And remember, students can learn worthwhile things even when their instructor is not talking.

We trust you will find this book to be a versatile pedagogical tool, useful in getting students not only to learn about learning theories but also to think with and about them as they make practical applications and raise basic issues.

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Chapter 1

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Introduction

This is a book about theories of learning. In it we want to get you to think about learning—how it happens, and what it is. Obviously, as a teacher, your job is or will be to help others learn. You may already have some good ideas about learning—after all, you have been doing it yourself for some time. Or you may feel there is not much for you to think about regarding learning since modern learning theorists surely must know all there is to know about it by now. Perhaps all you need to do is read about their theories and heed what they say when you teach or design curricula. Unfortunately, that is not so easy to do. Theorists do not all agree about what learning is or how it happens. Psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, neurophysiologists, philosophers, and others are still trying to understand how people learn. For there are great complexities—there seem to be different types of learning, some involving mental events such as remembering, analyzing, discriminating, and so forth, and some others that involve bodily movements and their coordination, such as when you learn to pitch a baseball. Certainly, theorists and researchers have some good ideas that will help you think about learning, and we will deal with many of them in this book. But ultimately, it is you who will have to make the best sense you can of how to foster various types of human learning in order to become a thoughtful and effective educator.

Learning

To get you into the right frame of mind to think about learning and to help you to see what this book is about, imagine that several of your friends were to contact you and ask a favor. One wants to learn to keep off junk food and seeks your advice and encouragement; the second is trying to learn Spanish vocabulary and asks you to act as tutor; the third has heard you debate in public, admires your skill, and wants your help in learning how to do it for herself; and the fourth friend is learning physics and is stuck on Einstein’s theory, and he asks you to explain it to him. Being generous in nature, and also a very talented person, you agree to help all of them!

Clearly, in all four cases you would be assisting a person to learn. But it is also clear that the types of learning involved are quite different. In the first case you would be helping someone to break a habit (dependence

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upon junk food no doubt is partly psychological, but also partly physiological, so what we have here is a learning assignment that involves the mental and the physical realms); in the second you would be helping a person commit information to memory; in the third case you would be teaching your friend a new and complex skill (again this involves the mental/psychological realm and the physical/motor realm); and your fourth friend needs to be taught something quite abstract (and taught so that he achieves that mysterious state we call “understanding”). No doubt you would use different teaching strategies: the method you use to teach your friend to avoid junk food would not work with the learning of debating skills. And rote memorization, which works in the case of foreign words, is not likely to succeed with learning Einstein’s theory. Your friend could memorize it, certainly, but this will not necessarily enable him to understand or apply it intelligently, and that presumably is what he is after.

The Teacher’s Responsibility

How would you go about selecting a suitable teaching strategy in each case? How would you know that it was suitable? If one of your friends failed to learn, would you blame yourself for selecting a poor method? Teachers face these issues all the time, but with added complexity thrown in. They are not usually helping one person at a time, but are trying to promote learning in a class of perhaps thirty or more students. What teaching method would you use if all four of your friends turned up at one time? And how convinced are you that there is a single method or approach that would work adequately in all four cases? Furthermore, you are safe in assuming that your friends want to learn the things they have sought your help with, but this is not always a safe assumption to make in a classroom. Promotion of learning is not unidimensional—the importance of motivating students to learn cannot be emphasized enough; also important is catering for students who have different learning abilities and who cover the work at different rates, deciding what content to teach and what activities to organize in order to facilitate this learning, maintaining discipline, and socializing students to become functioning members of society—all these are grist to the teacher’s mill. Thus, anything you learn will have to be balanced against these other things; a teacher is constantly making difficult “judgment calls.”

This book does not cover all the complexities of a teacher’s life in the classroom—it is a book about theories of learning. In it we can only hope to stimulate you to think about learning, about the forms it takes, and about what you, as a teacher, might do to promote it in students. We cannot

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make you a good teacher. You have to do that for yourself. But thinking seriously about theories of learning should help.

The Variety of Theories

At this point you may have become aware of the suspicious fact that we have been using a key word in the plural: “theories” of learning. Using the plural here is in marked contrast with the mainstream tendency over the course of Western thought to treat the learning of propositions (such things as “Sydney is the oldest and largest city in Australia”) as the basic type of learning that should be the starting point for a theory that will apply to all cases of learning. In common with other philosophers, we reject this simplifying assumption.

So, then, why is there more than one theory in this area? There are several answers. In the first place, as we have already illustrated, there is more than one type of learning. It is not clear whether a theory that explains how habits are formed, or how facts are memorized, will also explain how a learner comes to understand a complex and abstract piece of science. (In the field of medicine, the “germ theory of disease” does not explain genetic defects—different types of phenomena require different explanations.) Of course, some researchers who accept the mainstream assumption mentioned above are trying to develop a single comprehensive learning theory; indeed, scientists in many fields are driven to integrate knowledge in this way, for if they are successful the results give a great deal of intellectual satisfaction and solve a number of diverse problems. But so far, in the field of learning, no such attempt has been a resounding success. Indeed, some theorists believe the mind is “modular,” composed of a number of differently functioning systems that have been cobbled together in the course of evolution; others insist that the types of learning are so different that it is unreasonable to expect that a single theory could cover them all.

To help you see what we mean, consider some of the things you have learned in your life so far—and then think about how you learned them. For instance, most of us have learned directly from experience without instruction, study, or practice that ice is cold, flames are hot, water is wet, and knives can cut. However, when we learned the alphabet and how to count to ten, almost certainly we all required a little initial supervised instruction and needed to do some sing-song practicing. But it would be hard to think of learning to play chess or to drive a car without undergoing sustained instruction and without focusing one’s mental efforts on the

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tasks embodied in the mastery of such things.

What do these examples suggest? First, there seem to be different sorts of learning, some simple and some complex, some involving the acquisition of knowledge and others involving the mastery of skills and the formation of dispositions. Second, while some things can be learned without a teacher, there are many situations in which the help of a teacher is vital for many learners.

There also is a possibility that different theories of learning have resulted from various investigators approaching the phenomenon of learning from different directions and armed with different initial “hunches.” You may recall the old Indian folk tale about the blind men who were given an elephant to examine. The man who felt the tail got quite a different impression of the beast than the man who felt one of the legs, while the man who started with the trunk reached yet another startling conclusion. So it is in all scientific enquiries—the initial ideas or hypotheses the investigator forms may color his or her later conclusions.

Consider the following possibilities: If one were to focus on how a child learns that flames are hot and take this to be a typical case of learning, a particular (and probably narrow) experiential learning theory most likely would result. But such a theory probably would be different from one that would result from starting with a different case—say, how a child learns to count to ten. Neither of these theories, however, would be likely to be formulated by someone who had selected as a typical case of learning more complicated things like how people learn to drive a car or how high school students learn history. Thus, a psychologist or educational researcher who starts with the insight that humans are part-and-parcel of the animal kingdom may try to explain human learning in the same way that animal learning is explained (say, the learning processes in pigeons or rats). On the other hand, a researcher who regards the human brain as a type of computer, differing from the popular brands largely in that it is made of protoplasm instead of silicon chips, may try to explain as much learning as possible in data-processing terms.

It would be a mistake to think that only researchers hold such divergent, rival views. Teachers, too, vary a great deal in the underlying images they have of the nature of their students. Some regard all members of their school classes as being potentially equal in ability to learn, while others regard the students as inherently quite different; some regard the school as having great power to shape the minds of the students, while

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others regard it as being marginally influential at best; some see the students as unwilling and rebellious, while others see them as eager to learn and inclined to behave if they are treated properly.

Whatever your view on these matters, as a professional charged with fostering the intellectual development of your students, you should be acquainted with the variety of theories that have been put forward. Your eyes will be opened to new possibilities, and to facets of your students that you might otherwise not notice. Just as travel broadens the mind, so does acquaintance with rival viewpoints. You should reflect on the various theories of learning, and think about the implications that they have for your work in the classroom. The following chapters should help you set out on this professional journey.

An Objection: We Don’t Need Theories, Just Common Sense

Research in education and the social sciences is sometimes criticized on the ground that it is futile, for it only comes up with “findings” that are so obvious that anyone with common sense knew these things before the research was done. This attitude is particularly common in the realm of teaching; there is nothing mysterious or complex here, for the principles are pretty obvious to anyone who reflects for just a few moments—a book like Perspectives on Learning is quite unnecessary!

Fortunately for us, as authors, there is a decisive two-pronged answer to this. First, there actually has been some research on what people regard as “obvious.”1 Several decades ago a student of the great educational psychologist Nathaniel Gage drew up two lists of supposed “findings” of social science research; the second list contained the opposites of the items on the first list. (List one might have items like “teenage girls are better at Z than boys,” while the second list would have “teenage girls are not as good as boys at Z.”) A large number of laypeople were shown one or the other of the lists (nobody, of course, was shown both lists), and asked to judge whether or not each of the reported “findings” was so obvious that the research should not have been done. In many cases, both of the contradictory findings were judged to be so obvious that the result was commonsensical! The moral here, of course, is that we need to be cautious about what we judge to be commonsense knowledge. (And recall that our ancestors thought it was commonsense that the world was flat, and that the cure for many diseases—possibly including anemia—was to “bleed” the patient.)

The second point in the answer to the objection that all we need to

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foster learning is common sense is that there is often bias in the selection of examples; clearly there are some occasions when research confirms the “obvious,” but we should not overemphasize these and ignore the many important cases where the answer to the question is not obvious at all. (Nor should we downplay the importance of actually confirming the obvious!) Is it obvious, before research, which method of teaching reading —“phonics” or “whole language”—is most effective and what the unintended harmful consequences of each might be? Is it obvious, in teaching a new mathematics skill, whether or not “massed practice” is superior to “distributed practice” (that is, giving a large number of practice exercises in a clump, or spreading the practice out over a somewhat extended time frame)? Is it obvious, before research, what the limitations to human memory are? If gender differences are found in some educational performance, is it obvious before research whether the difference is due to biological/developmental or sociocultural factors?

The Plan of the Book

We will start with a consideration of two classical theories of learning that may appear simple and a little strange to modern eyes. But we will try to show that Plato’s “recollection” theory and Locke’s “blank tablet” theory offer some interesting ways to think about learning and set some problems and issues with which modern theories are still trying to deal.

Then we will look at behaviorism, a theory of learning that dominated the field of psychology for a large part of the twentieth century. The behaviorist takes learning to be the result of actions of the environment on the learner. For instance, we learn that a lightning flash is soon followed by thunder and so we also may learn to cover our ears whenever we see lightning. Sometimes we find our environment and our actions in it to be rewarding and so we learn to repeat actions that generally result in something nice happening to us. People who are good at ping-pong and frequently win tend to play more often than those who lose every match. According to this behaviorist theory, we learn to act in acceptable ways by being praised when we do good things and by praise being withheld when we do not.

The behaviorist theory has been challenged by a number of other theories and we shall consider the major challengers in subsequent chapters. Gestalt theory views learning as a process involving the attempt to think things out and then having “it all come together” suddenly in the mind. Sometimes it is jokingly referred to as the “Aha!” or “Got it!” theory

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of learning or, more seriously, the “insight” theory. It is like poring over your class notes before an exam and finally coming to see how the ideas dealt with relate to one another. To explain this mental phenomenon, the Gestalt psychologists looked beyond behavior and the environment, and they tried to throw light on learning by investigating tendencies of the mind to pattern and structure experience.

Beginning with a hunch about the importance of firsthand experience to learning, John Dewey developed a “problem solving” theory of learning whose basic premise was that learning happens as a result of our “doing” and “experiencing” things in the world as we successfully solve real problems that are genuinely meaningful to us. School learning then, he argued, must be based on meaningful student experiences and genuine student problem solving. He believed that textbook problems most often were not real problems to students and that school learning should be an experientially active, not a passive, affair.

Taking a biological approach, Piaget viewed learning as an adaptive function of an organism. By means of learning, an organism develops “schemes” for dealing with and understanding its environment. For Piaget, learning is the individual’s construction and modification of structures for dealing successfully with the world. He also claimed that there are stages of intellectual development that all human beings pass through as they learn certain universal schemes for structuring the world (like the concepts of number, cause, time, and space) and as they learn certain aspects of logical reasoning. Piaget’s ideas have inspired many subsequent theorists of learning, including the so-called radical constructivists.

A defect in many of the preceding theories is that they consider learning to be an individual phenomenon—the learner is depicted as a lone inquirer. In fact, of course, learners are embedded in a social network; teachers, parents, siblings, and peers, not to mention characters on TV and in films, all influence what each of us will learn. Chapter 6 discusses some basic ideas related to this theme of the social dimension of learning from Dewey, Vygotsky, and Bandura down to the advocates of “situated learning” and participation in communities of practice. Chapter 7 returns to the notion of “structure,” this time with regard to the subject matter to be learned. Since subjects are organized bodies of knowledge, it might help learners if they could see or construct for themselves the basic outline or structure of the subject they are studying. Dewey, Bruner, Schwab, and Hirst offer some insights into this process. One of the justifications for teaching the structure of a subject is that this facilitates using the material

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in new contexts—and this is a segue to the age-old issue of transfer of learning. For literally thousands of years it has been held that a major aim of education is to train the mind so that the skills acquired and strengthened in one context can be applied to solving novel problems in other domains. The form this doctrine has taken over the centuries, and how it fares in the light of contemporary research, is the topic of Chapter 8.

Finally, in Chapter 9, we shall look at an emerging theory of learning that comes out of our contemporary technological revolution in computing and artificial intelligence. This approach to learning theory has been called various things but perhaps the best catch-all term for it is the “cognitive science” approach. As we think about learning from this point of view we will have to consider to what extent computers are modeled on human minds and to what extent we can understand minds and learning by treating them as “computerlike.” There may be as many puzzles as there are answers and insights offered by this emerging view, but we know that it is one that has stimulated much contemporary thinking about learning and is sure to be of import to educators in the future.

The last chapter in this book, Chapter 10, is somewhat different from the others. It is one we hope you will refer to and use as you go through the book itself because it is designed to stimulate further thought about the theories, problems, and issues raised in the book. We call this last chapter “Arguments and Issues.” In it there are eighteen vignettes—concrete cases in the form of dialogues, disputes, arguments, and debates—that raise interesting and important issues about learning, and bring theory closer to practice. Whether you refer to some of the cases in Chapter 10 as you go along, or save them for consideration at the end, we are sure you will find that class discussions of these examples will force even deeper thinking about learning and educating. For those who wish to sample some cases relevant to this first chapter before going on to Chapter 2, we recommend “The Relation of Learning Theory to Teaching” and “Different Kinds of Learning?” in Chapter 10. The book ends with references and additional recommendations for further reading that will take you beyond our introductory treatment of theories of learning and keep you thinking about them as you become a professional educator.

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Chapter 2

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Classical Theories

Interest in teaching and learning is not new; it probably antedates recorded history. The New Testament paints a picture of Jesus as a dedicated teacher, consistently using stories and examples that would communicate his ideas in a memorable way to his audiences. A few years earlier, Rabbi Hillel also won fame as a teacher. Going back further, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (428?–347 B.C.E.) expounded his ideas in lively dialogues, and his Academy was famous as a teaching institution. Plato, too, was concerned to use examples and stories that would make an impact. All this, of course, reflects the unsurprising insight that it is most effective to present material in a way that is both interesting and understandable to those who are to learn it.

But there is a problem here, and it is a tribute to Plato’s genius that he was able to perceive it. How is it that a learner is able to understand something new? Consider a person who was absolutely and completely ignorant; how could this person understand, and learn, something that was totally incomprehensible? (Could a computer, with completely empty data banks and no internal program, acquire a piece of factual information without any prior preparation?) Plato had one of the characters in his dialogue Meno raise the issue in this way:

I know, Meno, what you mean … 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.1

This problem, in one form or another, continues to plague researchers to the present day.

One answer that occurs after a little reflection is that learning depends upon the student having some prior knowledge or experience. A child who has not yet learned a language, and a computer that has not yet been programmed, cannot have anything “explained” to them. People listening to Plato or Hillel or Jesus would not be able to learn if they did not have enough experience to comprehend the parable being presented. A student who does not know that light has a velocity, and who does not have some understanding of the concepts of mass and energy, could not learn Einstein’s theory (at least in the sense of understanding it and its

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implications).

Further reflection shows that, as it stands, this solution is no solution at all—at best it pushes the problem one stage back. For where did this previous knowledge come from? How was it learned? Presumably it was able to be learned because something prior to it was known. But, in turn, how was this learned? Here we are in the grip of an infinite regress—an uncomfortable situation to be in. Learning is possible only if some prior things are known, and these prior things could have been learned only if something prior to them had been learned, and so on!

Plato’s Theory of Learning

The specifics of Plato’s own solution to this problem seem rather fanciful to the modern reader, but the principle he adopted to escape from the infinite regress is one that is still in use: knowledge is innate, it is in place in the mind at birth. At the end of his famous work, The Republic, Plato included a myth describing the adventures of a young soldier, Er, who appeared to have been slain in battle, but who revived nearly two weeks later and was able to describe what had happened to his soul during the time he seemed to be dead. Er, together with the souls of those who actually had died, was able to gaze on the realm of everlasting reality, and thus come to learn the truth. Er also witnessed how souls picked new lives, and he saw that just before they were reborn the souls camped overnight on the banks of the Forgetful River. They were forced to drink from the river, where some drank more than their fair portion; by the middle of the night all souls had forgotten all that they had seen in heaven, and then they were swept away to their new lives on Earth. The strong implication is that those who drank too fully would not be able, in the new life, to remember anything about reality, and these individuals would remain ignorant. Those who had drunk only the minimum, however, could with great effort—and with the prompting of education on Earth—recall the insights into reality their souls had received. These latter would be the people who, on Earth, would be regarded as having learned. In other words, for Plato learning was a process of recalling what the soul had already seen and absorbed; his theory (if we can call it that) even explains why it is that some people can learn more, or can learn more readily, than others. For Plato, teaching is simply the helping of this remembering process.

In the other dialogue we have mentioned, Meno, there is a famous passage in which a slave boy—who has never had any geometry lessons— is led by a series of questions to invent for himself a theorem related to

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that of Pythagoras, which states that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. The point is the same as in “The Myth of Er”; the slave boy apparently has learned something of which he was previously totally ignorant, but in fact it would be impossible for him to do so, and really what has happened is that he has recalled something that was in his soul (or, if you would prefer, in his mind) all the time. According to Plato, if one does not previously know something, one cannot learn it now! In later chapters of this book we will see how twentieth-century researchers faced up to Plato’s problem—their solutions are no less wonderful.

There is another important facet to Plato’s view of learning, one which some—but not all—recent writers have explicitly opposed. In an important respect Plato regarded learning as a rather passive process in which impressions are made upon the receptive soul or mind. After all, Er learned by observing the realities in heaven. Plato tells another story, “The Simile of the Cave,” about some prisoners chained in a cave so that they can look only at the wall furthest away from the entrance. Outside the cave people pass by, carrying various objects held high above their heads, but the prisoners can only see the shadows of the objects on the wall. What they learn in their world of the cave is about these shadows, which they mistake for knowledge of reality. Only if they are released and allowed to turn around will they come to see reality and acquire (learn) real knowledge. Plato was pointing out that many people who think they are knowledgeable actually are quite mistaken. They take appearance to be reality.

According to this simile, then, teaching is the process of releasing people from the chains of ignorance; but it is also clear that learning is passive, that it is a matter of “turning” and allowing the mind to see clearly. In other places Plato spelled out more clearly what is involved here, and it is obvious that he valued the place of abstract reasoning; the person who had been trained to reason clearly (logically and mathematically) would be more likely to escape from the cave of ignorance and see the truth by using his mind. But nevertheless seeing the truth was a kind of seeing. (And, of course, we still say “I see it” when we have learned something!) These points emerge in the following portion of Plato’s dialogue:

We must reject the conception of education professed by those who say that they can put into the mind knowledge that was not there before—rather as if they could put sight into blind eyes.

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It is a claim that is certainly made.

But our argument indicates that this capacity is innate in each man’s mind, and that the faculty by which he learns is like an eye which cannot be turned from darkness to light unless the whole body is turned; in the same way the mind as a whole must be turned away from the world of change until it can bear to look straight at reality…. Isn’t that so?

Yes.

Then this business of turning the mind around might be made a matter of professional skill, which would effect the conversion as easily and effectively as possible. It would not be concerned to implant sight, but to ensure that someone who had it already was turned in the right direction and looking the right way.2

Case One

To help you think about the points Plato is making, imagine this teacher– pupil interaction:

P. Mrs. Smith, I can’t figure out the answer to this math puzzle.

T: Which one, Henry?

P: The one that says, If you know that there are six grapes and two plums for each person sitting at a table and that there is a total of twenty-four pieces of fruit on the table, then you should know how many people are seated at the table … but I don’t.

T Sure you do. Think a minute. Could there be only one person?

P: No.

T: Why?

P: Because one person would get only six grapes plus two plums and that’s eight pieces of fruit and there are more than that.

T: How many more?

P: Sixteen.

T: And if each person gets eight pieces, how many more people could there be?

P: Two! So there must be three people seated at the table!

T: See, I told you that you knew the answer. You just needed to get yourself in a position to see it.

Did the teacher tell or explain anything to the pupil? Did the teacher

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teach? Did the pupil learn something? What? Do you think this is an example of Plato’s theory of learning? Why or why not? If you think about this case, and perhaps discuss it with others, we think you will see why Plato’s myths and similes have stimulated the imagination of his readers for more than two thousand years.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the general answer Plato gave to the question “How is learning possible?” is not acceptable. If people can learn only if they have previous knowledge, then it is no solution to say that the soul acquired this previous knowledge sometime earlier by means of a process of observation. For how could the soul learn by observing unless it already knew something? (Imagine a computer wired to a TV camera—a setup found in modern robots; the camera may “observe” the surroundings but unless the computer is programmed no information will be stored.) It is apparent that we are still in the grip of the infinite regress: Where did the original knowledge (or program) come from?

The Lockean Atomistic Model

A major attempt to answer this question was made nearly two thousand years after Plato. At the end of the seventeenth century the British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) developed a theory of learning that was to profoundly influence the early development of modern psychology, as well as shape educational practice down to the present day. Locke shared some of Plato’s assumptions but disagreed with him about others. Locke could not accept that knowledge was innate; in his view the infant came into the world with a mind that was completely devoid of content—it was like an “empty cabinet,” a “blank tablet,” or a “tabula rasa.” On the other hand, Locke seems to have realized that something had to be present for the child to be able to learn.

Modern technology gives us an advantage that Locke did not have; there is a familiar and simple example that now can be used to illustrate the principles he had in mind. These days just about all of us have purchased a hand-held electronic calculator. It comes from the factory nicely packaged; when it is turned on it lights up but nothing else happens, for it has no contents in its memory. It is exactly analogous to Locke’s newborn baby—it is a “blank slate.” But lying dormant within the calculator are various powers or abilities or capacities to perform operations. The device lies ready to perform multiplications and additions, calculate percentages and square roots, commit numbers to memory, and so on. These powers or capacities have been wired in by the

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manufacturers.

Similarly, Locke realized that the human infant is born with certain biologically preformed abilities, but these lie dormant. He was, of course, thinking about these matters long before the theory of evolution was developed, and he had no way to explain how the human species had come to acquire the various capacities and systems that it possesses. But just as the body was born with certain potentialities, so it was—for Locke—with the mind:

In this faculty of repeating and joining together its ideas, the mind has greater power in varying and multiplying the objects of its thoughts…. It can, by its own power, put together those ideas it has, and make new complex ones.3

The mental powers or faculties that allow learning to take place, then, are “wired in”—they are part of the biological equipment of the human species. But these powers require ideas to work upon; they require some mental content. How does Locke account for the acquisition of these initial ideas? Again the analogy of the calculator is helpful. In order to use the device we must punch in some basic data via the keyboard; we may feed in, for example, 3 + 5 =___. Only when some numbers are put “inside” the calculator will its powers come into operation. And these numbers come from the calculator’s outside environment. So it is with humans. Locke’s words are famous:.

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself.4

Locke’s account of learning, then, is as follows: The newborn baby knows nothing, but it immediately starts to have experience of its environment via its senses. It sees shapes and colors, it hears things, it tastes and touches and smells. The resulting simple ideas (as Locke calls them) are retained because the mind has the power of memory. Gradually the child will use his or her powers of combination, abstraction, and so on to build up complex ideas. The child also will experience certain “internal” phenomena, such as concentration, puzzlement, love, and rage, and from this there will be acquired certain other simple ideas that will be added to the rest. But no simple idea can be invented; if the child has not had the necessary experience, the simple idea will be missing, and this in turn will limit what can be produced in the way of complex ideas. A corollary of this is that all complex ideas can be traced back to the combination of a

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certain number of simple ideas.

It is easy for a modern reader to underestimate the power of Locke’s simple model of learning. But its relevance for the work of the teacher is great. In the late nineteenth century several researchers realized that the early years of schooling were not as effective as they might be, because young children were assumed by teachers to have had more experience than actually was the case. Surveys in the United States, for example, showed that many of those starting school in urban centers had never seen common farm animals (some children thought that cows were only an inch or so large, because they had only seen drawings of them in picture books); many did not know more than a few colors, and others had never seen the sea. More recently, in the 1960s, we realized that children from low-income families lack a great many of the basic concepts that those coming from more affluent homes have acquired, and researchers hypothesized that this is one reason why many children quickly become low achievers in school. The U.S. federal government’s “Operation Head Start” and the TV program Sesame Street were attempts to remedy this situation. Montessori schools, too, place a great deal of emphasis on the early sense experience of children, and they use a graded series of exercises with blocks of different colors, shapes, and textures.

All of these things are very much in the Lockean spirit; if children have not had a certain experience, then they will lack the related simple ideas, and as a result there may be deficiencies in the complex ideas they can build up (for some of the simple building blocks will be missing). One of the lasting contributions made by Locke is to alert us to the issue of prerequisites for learning: What experiences or simple ideas must a child have had in order to be able to go ahead and learn some new material? Teachers, in helping children to learn, do not think of this issue as often, perhaps, as they should. It is interesting to draw a contrast with computer programmers—in getting a computer to “learn” to perform some task, nothing can be taken for granted, and absolutely everything that the computer needs to “know” must be fed in. One slight omission, and the computer will not be able to perform in the desired manner. Maybe we should work on the principle that the same is true of human learners!

Case Two

Imagine the following teaching-learning episode. Ask yourself as you read it, does it illustrate Locke’s theory? Can Plato’s theory explain it?

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T: Today, class, we are going to try to understand the theory of continental drift. Who can tell me what a continent is? Peter?

P: A continent is a very large land mass like North America or Africa.

T: And, of course, we all know what drift is, don’t we? It’s like putting a leaf in a stream and watching it move wherever the current pushes it. You’ve all seen that happen, haven’t you?

Class: Yesss!

T: Now let’s look at the map. If you could move North and South America across the Atlantic Ocean, how would those continents fit against the continents of Europe and Africa? Mary?

M: Quite well. I never thought of it that way, but it’s just like tearing a piece of cardboard and putting the torn edges back together again.

T: Do you think it’s possible that long ago North and South America were connected to Europe and Africa in one large land mass which then broke off and drifted apart?

M: Looks possible, but how could something as heavy and solid as a continent drift across an ocean? Aren’t the continents attached to the earth’s crust?

T: Have you ever watched a pot of soup boil? The water bubbles up and pushes solid pieces in the soup away from the center toward the sides of the pot. Geologists believe that the inner core of the earth is hot molten matter that creates currents like those in a boiling pot. They have found a rift line in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean which is a thin part of the earth’s crust and is made up of newer materials than the continents. So they hypothesize that the hot inner core of the Earth leaks out at this “rift” and pushes the continents further and further away from each other since they first broke apart millions of years ago.

M: So, it’s like the leaf drifting on the stream or pieces in a soup pot. The continents move because of the liquid movements below them. I see!

T: Class, any questions?

Class: Nooooo!

Before you read on you may find it interesting to go back to the “fruit on the table” case. Can Locke’s theory of mental powers or faculties of

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reasoning explain what’s happening to the pupil solving the math puzzle? Which theory, Plato’s or Locke’s, seems more satisfactory for interpreting the problem about fruit? Why? We shall revisit Locke’s theory briefly in Chapter 5 when we discuss modern “radical constructivists.”

A Critique

It would be a mistake, however, to think that the Lockean model of learning is perfect. One defect that Locke shares with Plato is the passive picture that is presented of the learner, especially during the early stages of the acquisition of knowledge. For Plato, the pupil was a spectator of reality; and for Locke, the mind was like an empty cabinet waiting to be filled. Very few things are as inert as a cabinet! As we will see in later chapters, more recent theorists of learning have emphasized the activity— both physical and mental—of the learner. Perhaps Locke had never closely observed a young baby, but certainly he missed the significance of the constant handling, sucking, and probing that goes on as the child learns about the world. To Locke, and probably Plato, experience is something that happens to a learner; but to more recent learning theorists, experience is something that a learner engages in, something that transpires as a result of the interaction between a learner and the surroundings. The philosopher and educationist John Dewey put it nicely; writing about American schools early in the twentieth century, he said that

those under instruction are too customarily looked upon as acquiring knowledge as theoretical spectators, minds which appropriate [gain] knowledge by direct energy of intellect. The very word pupil has almost come to mean one who is engaged not in having fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge directly.5

Dewey noted that the mind, the “organ” for acquiring knowledge, traditionally was conceived as being quite unrelated to “the physical organs of activity,” and activity of the body was regarded as having nothing to do with learning. Indeed, activity was thought “to be an irrelevant and intruding physical factor.” In contrast, Dewey stressed the link between learning and doing. He was a powerful critic of Plato and Locke, and he was a pioneer of “activity methods” in the classroom. We will examine his theory of learning in more detail later.

Another interesting aspect of Locke that has come under criticism is his atomism. Locke was a friend of the famous physicist Sir Isaac Newton and was much impressed by the method Newton had used—the method of breaking a physical system down (in theory) into its smallest parts, “atoms” or “corpuscles,” and then studying what happened to these. In other words, Newton started with small particles and gradually pieced