The robot takes the opportunity to propose the “papillon” model of cognition.

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No One Knows How People Learn

In Praise of the Giant Black Box At the Heart of What We Do

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As we round out the year, I thought I might take a little time to remind everyone that no one knows how people learn. If you are in the business of education, you would do well to keep this in mind. It’s a fact so obvious as to generally be forgotten-the kind of thing many educators would like to pretend isn’t true. But that doesn’t make it any less real: the amount of understanding we have about how people learn is essentially nil. This is a wise thing to keep in mind as you go about your working life.

As soon as anyone starts talking to you about things like best practices, effect sizes, or any of the other discourse typically passed along to teachers about how learning works, take a moment to remind yourself: no one actually knows how people learn. In science, we call this kind of thing a black box — a system where we can see inputs and outputs but have no clear understanding of what happens inside.

Literally nothing?

Meh. It depends on how you define your terms. But here’s what I mean when I make this claim: there is no mechanistic understanding of what happens in a brain when learning occurs. At the very least, our understanding is so vague as to be useless for helping people learn more effectively.

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David Knuffke
David Knuffke

Written by David Knuffke

Writing about whatever I want to, whenever I want to do it. Mostly teaching, schools and culture.

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