The role of courses in learning has been on my mind a lot recently, largely due to conversations with various present and former School Meeting members. There is continuing pressure on the part of the outside educational community to make people at the school feel that there is something defective in a person’s education if he hasn’t had certain formal courses in certain subjects. This pressure from the outside plays on the insecurity of many School Meeting members who wonder, “Can I really go into a certain field if I haven’t had courses in it, if I haven’t had formal schooling in it and learned it ‘properly’?” An uneasy feeling is generated that a person just can’t do something right if he doesn’t have an “adequate” course background in it. In fact, it is virtually universal that if you go to somebody and say, “I want to become an X, or Y, or Z,” the first kind of advice you get is to take courses and get a formal degree in the subject, because that way you will get the knowledge you need to do the work, whether it is laboratory work or history or English literature or anything else. So I want to address myself to this question, because a lot of times we are asked, “Do you have courses?” It is not so much that I want to discuss whether or not we have courses, but I would like to focus on the more basic question of how one learns something, and in particular what relationship does taking a course have to how one learns things.
As I see it, there are three levels of learning that take place in every person. The first I would like to call “curious probing”. It consists of very superficial attacks on the environment, or on any particular subject. It is something random, something accidental; it has to do with a person reaching out to grapple with things that happen to him or he comes across in his environment. It is rapid, it is triggered by something that happens; it is not the result of contemplation. You come across something and you want to know more about it, so you ask a question, or you are curious about it and you go to the library and get a book about it and think about it for a while. Most of this curious probing never leads anywhere serious. It is filed away, it just becomes part of the great reservoir of the subconscious that you may call upon later to make some interesting associations when you do some really important work. It has not direct follow-up.
I think it is really important to understand that the very nature of curious probing is superficial. That’s a desirable characteristic in this case. The fact that you don’t follow up isn’t a defect in this kind of learning; on the contrary, it is the essence of this kind of learning, because it is meant to be scatter-shot, it is meant to introduce you to as many different things and stimuli as possible. Our formal educational system has emasculated curious probing terribly, because it has made a virtue of “follow-up”, and thus has robbed the probing of its most essential aspects, namely, spontaneity and rapidity. If you want a vivid picture of what I am talking about, look at any elementary school. The elementary schools pride themselves nowadays in being very sensitive to the interests of children; they boast that they pick up all the leads provided by the children and try to follow them out. A really good elementary school teacher is one who watches a child closely, who observes that first glimmer of interest in, say, a rock, and who then promptly comes forward and tells the child, “Oh, you are interested in rocks; we have a wonderful collection of books on geology, etc.” This approach is a total turn-off to curiosity. What the child learns in an environment like that is that it doesn’t pay to probe, and if you do, you have got to hide it like a criminal activity, because if anybody ever catches you, they will follow up on you and they will get you involved to a degree that you just don’t want to be and don’t feel you ought to be.
Personally, I think that schools respond this way to initial curiosity as part of a calculated campaign by the educational establishment to kill curiosity. You see, there are two ways to kill curiosity – an efficient way and an inefficient way. The inefficient way used to be just to forbid people from doing things. But people found out that this was inefficient, because while the teacher was standing up lecturing and trying to keep discipline, somebody had another book hidden under his school book or his desk, and was curiously probing away. So modern man found a better way to kill curiosity – simply to nurture it to death by the follow-up approach; to grab it, to “love” it, to convert it to something that it isn’t and to make a person feel guilty if he doesn’t follow up his first tentative probes. So I think that the modern day student who is in a very progressive environment has his curiosity knocked out of him really very quickly. He learns that whenever he looks at any kind of interesting thing he is going to be pounce3d on. As a result, probing curiosity loses its whole function as a learning mechanism.
Now we turn to a second level of learning. When I call it “second” I don’t mean to imply that it is in any sense “between” the first and the third. It is a different kind of learning, and happens to be number two on my list. This kind of learning I would call very bluntly “entertainment-style”; it takes place as a secondary byproduct of an entertainment experience. The primary aim of the entertainment is having a good time. That’s a perfectly legitimate primary aim: we like to go out and have a good time. The second kind of learning is one that comes as a by-product of having a good time. Everybody knows that if you go to Coney Island you learn a lot; there are all sorts of things going on, it is a fantastic experience, and anybody who has ever gone to an amusement park knows what I mean. Or consider a movie: you see a movie, and you may learn a moral message, or you may learn some little trivia about camera technique or something else. All kinds of things. We know that all kinds of learning can be picked up as a by-product while you are having a good time. This is painless learning, and it is in a category of its own because it is not to be confused with learning as a primary goal. I’m all for people having a good time, but if the primary emphasis is on the entertainment and only the secondary by-product is learning, then clearly, almost by definition, this is not an efficient mechanism for conquering an area of knowledge. You can get lots of secondary fall-out, but learning is not the primary goal. On the other hand, it is a pleasant thing to be entertained. People like to be entertained, people seek it. And it has been a fact throughout history that people involved in the entertainment profession have always sought to teach something on the side. For example, political movements always seized on the entertainment media as a way to introduce their program, via ideological literature, ideological theater and poetry and music and so forth. The idea is to seize people’s desire at all ages to have a certain amount of fun, and to utilize that for other purposes as well.
The third category of learning that I’d like to distinguish is learning for the sake of mastering something, for the sake of getting hold of a field or an area or a subject. This kind of learning is the opposite of curious probing. For some reason, a person decides that he is focused; he has been scanning, and the scanning camera has stopped, and it has focused on a certain scene, and he really wants to get a good clear picture of it. There are many characteristics of this third kind of learning that are worth noting. Characteristic number one is that it is unstoppable. It is something that wells up within a person and becomes a complete preoccupation. Indeed, that is what it means to zero in on something, to make it your primary aim to master an area. That becomes the only thing you want to do, it is what you are obsessed with, what you are totally devoted to and involved with. It is an incredibly difficult thing to place effective roadblocks in the path of a person who has really focused on something and wants to do it. You can’t discourage them with any of the ordinary arguments, such as “it’s too hard for you, it’s too expensive, it will take you too long, it’s too this or too that.” None of these things will work because the person shows an exceptional degree of obstinacy and sheer orneriness in pursuing what he wants. This is something that happens all the time in the Sudbury Valley School. When we first started the school, we used to have long discussions on how we could tell when a student is really interested in something. We finally realized that it is really no problem at all. The question sounds like a good question, but when you think about it you realize that it is no question at all. If a person is really interested in something, he can’t be stopped. So if you really want to find out, try and stop him. Of course, usually you don’t have any need to find out, so you just let him go for a while and his interest becomes evident anyway. You can see it in a whole range of activities that have happened this year. For example, no matter how much you discouraged keeping goats in the barn, you just couldn’t stop it. It was impossible. The people involved kept at it all spring, all summer, and in the fall it just never stopped. And we have had people who wanted horses here before, but we just couldn’t stop Heather McKay. She just carried the thing through until she got it all together, all the approvals and permits and information – the whole works. In a similar vein, some people have been saying for years that people are not doing more biology with a microscope because we have a very old microscope. It has been said that if we had a nice microscope, the new kind people have nowadays instead of our 50-year-old model, then there would be more use for it. And then all of a sudden a couple of School Meeting members just became interested in microscopy. Out came the old microscope, the lighting was adjusted, the focus was adjusted, and it became a non-problem. The people using it were absolutely determined to look at every specimen they could lay their hands on. They were going to do it come hell or high water. There was just no stopping them. These examples are multiplied time and time again in the school, as they are in the world at large. Any biography of any person whose achievements we respect will usually stress this point, that the person got an idea, clung to it, and nothing could stop him. Biography after biography is just such a story of how people overcame obstacle after obstacle to achieve their goals. So the hallmark of learning for the sake of mastering is the really enormously potent drive that yields to nothing at all. Even the normal, everyday life drives play second fiddle. You don’t eat for days on end, you don’t sleep enough, you are tired, you don’t think of entertainment, you don’t think of sex, you just think about the thing you want to do and you are totally taken up with finishing it.
Now from these observations there follows a second important characteristic; there is no turning this drive to learn on and off. Time plays a very important role, in the sense that you can’t be relaxed about it. You can’t be told, “Well, it is very nice that you are interested in this, but if you come in every morning at 9 o’clock I’ll give you fifteen minutes, or an hour.” This is just out of the question. The person wants to know now. He is ready to sit down and talk twenty hours in a row, and maybe that would satisfy him, but stringing it out for months and months is out of the question. He wants to go the library now, to read every book on the shelf, every book in the Framingham Library and in the Boston Public Library, even though it takes an hour each way to get there and back. All these things he cannot wait to do; his interest can’t be turned on and off. It has got to be satisfied now.
A third point about learning for mastery is that it brings with it its own evaluation. It is an inherently self-evaluative kind of learning, in the following sense. When you set as a goal to conquer a certain area you will stop only when you have convinced yourself that you have achieved your goal. No one else can convince you that you have achieved it if you haven’t and if you think you have, no one else can convince you that you haven’t. How many times have you seen someone come over to a child and say, “It’s all right, you don’t have to go any further, go to sleep now,” or “It’s time to turn to something else, it’s no good for you to do nothing but this, you’ve done enough in this direction, you’re good enough at it.” And the person will insist on going on further until he has convinced himself inside that the quest is finished.
Now I have to be very clear about this. When I talk about self-evaluation I mean that the person sets his own goals, and determines for himself whether he is really satisfied. In the course of his activity, he will almost always turn to other people for verification and for instruction. He will ask how you do this, how you master this or that skill, does this look right, does that? He will ask for a lot of input, opinions and data from other people. But the ultimate decisions as to whether or not he’s satisfied is his and his alone. Again, we know this to be true of classic situations that we boast about. Think of all the people who have come up with new theories. We know very well that the reactions are always negative whenever a person comes up with anything new. The standard reaction of the whole world is that this is not good, it’s wrong, it’s new, it is different from what we have always done and from what is right. An innovator uses these reactions to sharpen his arguments, but they are never a substitute for his own personal determination that what he is doing feels right.
Having distinguished three types of learning, we can now return to the question posed in the title: Do people learn from courses? Reviewing the three basic categories of learning outlined above, we can answer the question rather quickly. Courses cannot play a significant role in a person’s quest to master a field. The very word “course” tells you what the essence of a course is. A course is something spread out in orderly fashion, block by block over a period of time; it runs a course. Thus a course inherently contradicts the immediacy of a drive toward mastery. It just won’t do. It also won’t do because courses by nature derive from external opinion, external evaluation and external authority.
Now, everyone accepts this viewpoint for people over the age of 25; this is just another example of how our culture treats different ages in different ways. Consider the following proposition. If a mature adult – say, an academician – comes along and says, “I want to switch fields. I have decided that I’m not going to continue working in physics, I’m going into history,” will his colleagues think he is going to enroll in History I and then take a year of History II then a year of History III, maybe get a B.A. in History, and then maybe a year later a Masters? You can laugh at the thought of it. Of course they are not thinking that. They are thinking, “Old professor so in so is going into history – that means he is going to learn the field of History.” How he does it in detail will not concern them, but one thing nobody will assume is that he is going to take courses, because it is absurd. You don’t think a mature professor is going to get anything out of a course. He is obviously going to attack the material directly. In our culture mature people who have academic degrees and achievements are considered to be the kinds of people that have the know-how to go about learning. Anybody else is considered incapable of performing this without a professor to lead them. This is a neat situation where the professors set all the rules and reap the benefits, and it is a self-perpetuating mechanism by which the academic elite keeps itself in control by perpetuating the belief only they are capable of mastering a subject without professional guidance, while all the rest of the population needs their guidance in order to get into a field.
To get back to my central point, it is clear that in the community at large people do not think courses are needed to master a field. But the culture sets up a distinction between officially “learned” people and all the rest, and admits what I’ve just said for the learned people and doesn’t admit it for the rest. It is my contention that like all the other distinctions between the intellectual elite and the general populace, this distinction is invalid – in this case, because everybody with a normal mind is just as capable of grasping a subject on his own steam as a professor is.
The role of courses in curious probing has already been discussed, and there is really nothing to add. Courses simply have no relationship to curious probing. We are thus left with the role of courses in entertainment learning, where I think they have an important function. Courses are the learning analogs of the soap opera, or magazine serial, or anything like that. They are a stretched out form of entertainment. After all, in our schools we’ve got to keep the students entertained for eight to ten months, so naturally the solution is similar to the one the television networks adopt. They have to keep housewives entertained, all day long, month in and month out, and they would get nowhere if they gave a complete show every day; instead, they string out the story over weeks and months. In the same way, schools devise a stretched out entertainment mechanism to keep their clients happy. The entire science of pedagogy from A to Z, on the elementary and secondary and college level, is the science of entertaining students with a hoped-for educational by-product. A course is a way to ensure that your entertainment will continue over a period of time.
I wish to stress that I do not look down on entertainment as a value in itself. But it is absurd for people to confuse the entertainment with learning for mastery. That’s where the problems begin. For example, I don’t think there has ever been anybody in the Sudbury Valley School who opposed courses, recognizing them for what they are, any more than anyone has opposed showing movies or anything like that. But we have never made the mistake of confusing these two functions.
I want to add a word on a related point. There is one kind of lecture course that stands in marked contrast to all the other kinds. Also, it’s relatively rare. I am referring to a course that serves a primary function for the lecturer rather than for the hearers. There are times when a person comes up with new ideas, and as part of his development of a way to communicate with the rest of the world, he may give a series of lectures or a course, or engage in some other such interaction with other parties. In that case, the course serves as the first communication of an original work to the world. This serves a crucial role for the creator. It helps him clarify his ideas, it provides feedback, etc. The only question is, what good is it to the listener? And that’s really a puzzling question. If the listener happens to be zeroed in on the subject matter, which is very rare – then an almost miraculous thing takes place: here he is, interested in a given subject, and all of a sudden he just happens to be in the vicinity of a person who has just created some new thinking on the subject. It is an exhilarating experience, but unfortunately very rare. On the other hand, for most of the hearers such lectures are just a very exceptional form of entertainment – exceptional because in addition to the usual entertainment value there is the thrill of being among the first to hear the ideas being expressed. I remember many such occasions in physics in the 50's and early 60's. A person would come up with a new theory, and when he gave his first lectures the place would be electric. The hearers would respond to his creativity, though they couldn’t care less about the subject matter per se.
A school like ours must have a place for that kind of a lecture course not because it is directly important to the students for the subject matter – that is a rare accident – but because it is important to maintaining a vibrant intellectual atmosphere in the school. It should be widely known that we always welcome people who are willing to share with us the first fruits of their creative thoughts.
In summary, the thing I am most concerned about, year in and year out, is getting rid of the fallacy that makes talented people do stupid things – the fallacy that in order to master a subject, courses are important. I’ve seen all too many people go out of here on their way to doing something really exciting and fail or stumble because somebody has snared them into taking courses, into going through some kind of formal education. Instead, they should have followed through their initial interests on their own, and thus launched themselves on the path to real mastery.
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