What Medieval People Got Right About Learning (2019)

Summary

We tend to assume that if people today and people five hundred years ago do things differently, it’s because we’ve figured out a better way to do it. After all, we have microscopes, democracy and penicillin. People in the middle ages lit cats on fire for fun. Yet despite overwhelming progress, it’s ironically in the area of education that we may be the ones who have it backward. Apprenticeships were, for a long time, the dominant way of learning professional skills. A master agrees to show you how to perform a useful skill. In exchange, he got a bunch of free labor from you while you were learning. Why Apprenticeships Beat Classrooms There’s a few good reasons to prefer the apprenticeship model to classes. 1. Transfer is Hard. The first has to do with transfer. It’s been well-known for decades that learning general abstractions is very hard. Instead, what we learn tends to be hyperspecific. It’s only after learning many hyperspecific things that we get the ability to apply it to completely novel problems. Consider the findings that economics students tend not to perform better on problems which require economic reasoning, that taking a high-school psychology class doesn’t improve performance in a later psychology class in college, or even more startlingly, that a significant fraction of American high-school graduates can’t calculate the cost of ordering office supplies, given a list.[1][2] These educational failures are an embarrassment. But they more likely reflect the simple fact about transfer: if you’ve only ever done math, psychology or economics problems in a very narrow setting, you’re unlikely to apply them in the real world, even if you could in principle. Classes are divorced from the practical applications of learning. Apprenticeships train in exactly the situation you’d want to apply the skill. 2. Learn by Doing (and Watching). The second reason to prefer apprenticeships is that they more easily mimic how human beings learn almost every other skill we ne...