Learning: By Rote Vs, Asking Why.

I had a very pleasant lunch yesterday with two Voca colleagues, Roger and Peter. As my lunches tend to always go, we ended up discussing a number of interesting topics, this lunch steered entirely clear of technology.

We discussed counselling, consciousness, upbringing and education. I told Roger and Peter in my typical bombastic manner about a very interesting piece of research I read recently in New Scientist. The article touched on the manners in which humans and our cousins great apes learn from our parents. If you were asked which species is more likely to learn by simple, exact copying of parental activities, which species would you pick?

It turns out that humans are far more likely than any other great ape to shortcut learning by simple imitation. The example that is often quoted is the Mother making a 'pot roast', she cuts off one end of the joint and puts it in the pot beside the main part. Her daughter asks her why she does that and she is forced to reply that she doesn't know, her mother did it that way. So the Mother asks here mother who replies that her own mother always did it that way. The Mother then calls her grandmother who replies that she started doing that because she didn't have a big enough pot.

It appears that humans are extremely likely to learn by rote. It seems to be a shortcut that we have evolved. I believe that this shortcut emerged because of the volume of information that we are forced to learn in order to survive in our culture. If we questioned every single tiny fact, we would never learn enough to sustain the complexity of our culture before we were 50 years old.

That's not to say that questioning is not important. Without 'Why?' we would never have progressed our culture.

I would suggest that the best education a child can get is one that is primarily by rote that does not suppress the desire to question. In effect there is a balance: sufficient rote learning to provide a basic body of knowledge to survive in the world coupled with time spent teaching how to question this body of knowledge.

I believe that you actually have to have a basic level of knowledge before you can decide which questions are worth asking.

When I say 'Culture' I mean it in the more scientific sense of the set of learnt behaviours and knowledge that we as a species learn rather than are born knowing.