What makes learning work?

If learning is the desired outcome, we should ask "What makes learning work?" (Cf. What makes learning fun?). Psychologically, we experience emotional pain as a reason to stop and think (I shouldn't have done that, how stupid, what can I do differently next time, etc.). On the other hand, we experience emotional pleasure as a motivator to embrace what just happened and try it again (wow I am so in love with that person, this feels great, I'm so happy). Learning seems to weave a course between pleasure and pain, with learned patterns and techniques as the outcome. (Cf. Marvin Minsky's "The Emotion Machine" and essays for One Laptop Per Child for more discussion about pleasure and pain.)

If we want to understand what makes learning work, we should try to understand not just the desire to avoid pain and secure pleasure, but how moving between these states produces useful patterns. We can evaluate a learning context in terms of its efficacy at securing outcomes. For example, it is widely agreed that immersion is the best way to learn a language. Charlie isn't going to be as motivated to master Japanese vocabulary if the opportunities or reasons for practice are slim. Joe isn't going to study mathematics just for the sake of studying mathematics: there should be some point, maybe an engineering problem to solve.

So, part of what makes learning "work" is the context and opportunity for application. At the same time, this is also what produces risks (e.g. risks of saying something embarrassing in a new language, risks of building a bridge that falls down). This suggests that people learn well when the stakes are high enough (but probably not too high: we don't ask beginning engineers to build bridges until they have mastered enough skills that we can be reasonably sure the bridge won't fall down). (Cf. Voygotsky's "Zone of Proximal Development".)

Again, if learning is the desired outcome -- not just for the individual, but socially (e.g. learning how we're going to deal with climate change), then "learning" becomes an important economic good, almost a new "currency" for society. The typical approach is to use the market as a mechanism for learning, in other words, successful businesses make money, others fail. In this context, the "fictional" currency of money in a fairly direct sense is substituted for the "real" currency of learning and adaptation.

(Why are Harvard tuition fees so high? Partly because Harvard degrees typically command a high salary, which is itself partly because Harvard graduates have almost invariably got what it takes to perform well in the world of work.)

And yet, if we want to be a bit creative about it, we can look for more direct means to support learning; and people do this all the time, ranging from parents who put brain-stimulating mobiles over the cribs of their children, to teenagers reading various and sundry "how-to" guides for various and sundry fields of interest, to college grads shelling out bucks for test preparation books or courses so they can get into a good business/law/medical school, etc. The "economy" of learning can be managed as a generalized "commons". Which, arguably, is what it is.

The market approach is one way to manage a commons, or one aspect of a commons management approach; but there are many others. Paragogy's first principle "Shared context as a decentred centre" is an invitation to look for ways to manage the learning commons/ecology/economy in ways that work well for everyone involved.

Which brings me back to the point about how learning can work well for individuals (immersion, application, relevance, "appropriate challenges"). People have been organizing learning enviroments that work well for the people involved since the dawn of time. Whether we consider a pottery workshop, a hunting party, a communal kitchen, or a 17th Century college, social organizations around learning are a big part of what people, historically, do.

Accordingly, there is a great range of styles of organizing learning -- perhaps as many as there are different resources to manage. We have everything from hands-on instruction, to formal apprenticeships, to learning on the job, to lectures, textbooks, and dialogs.

The idea of an "expert" instructor -- a pedagogue -- seems like something of an exception to the rule. (Cf. Ivan Illych.) Nevertheless, it is indeed historically the case that the wise old master teaches younger and more naive students. (Not so for wise old rats, cf. William Burroughs.) Nevertheless, kids learn together on the playground, young wedded couples figure out how to make a life together, and democratic societies work out resource management issues on the large scale through (more or less) egalitarian means. Peer learning has, accordingly, been as important as learning from older and wiser folks since time immemorial, though it may be harder to understand or formalize.

We should look more at how these different kinds of approaches to learning support different kinds of learning tasks and solving different kinds of problems.