Take

Lectures, as a medium, have no carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation. Yet if we were aliens observing typical lectures from afar, we might notice the implicit model they appear to share: “the lecturer says words describing an idea; the class hears the words and maybe scribbles in a notebook; then the class understands the idea.” In learning sciences, we call this model “transmissionism.” It’s the notion that knowledge can be directly transmitted from teacher to student, like transcribing text from one page onto another. If only! The idea is so thoroughly discredited that “transmissionism” is only used pejoratively, in reference to naive historical teaching practices. Or as an ad-hominem in juicy academic spats.

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Unlike most non-fiction books, textbooks usually are built around explicit cognitive models. For instance, they often alternate between explanations which introduce concepts, and exercises which push students to think about those concepts in specific ways. It’s great that textbooks didn’t choose their cognitive models by accident. That’s an important first step. But it’s not enough: people still struggle to reliably absorb knowledge from textbooks.

This is making something click for me that has always sounded off. The right, and especially the new, anti-woke, née "alt-", right, (but also authoritarian-oriented factions of every stripe), is obsessed with the idea that "things are not being taught anymore". Painting the picture of facts that are then left up to "but we could be completely wrong; what do you think?"

It looks to me as if in what Andy teaches me is known as metacognition in learning science, methods other than sitting there and just patiently absorbing what the person at the front of the blackboard tells you are involved, in the service of actually getting the new concepts and knowledge to be understood.

But taking this in from the outside, or from not seeing it implemented very well, it can turn into a fun-house mirror distortion. A misunderstanding that just because the student should be engaged to enable new learning to occur, and sometimes that even means having some sort of say in what that exercise should look like, that it then means the things to be learned are also fungible or arbitrary or ill-respected. Maybe even that anything but just teaching, unquestionably reading aloud, the raw materials is a dangerous diversion.

Challenging an idea or talking about its validity is a way for curious minds to probe what the idea actually means and to figure out its consequences. Looking at something from the context of another time or culture or set of mores is a way of understanding both perspectives better.

None of this is hopefully news, but the rest of Andy's text is about having to do more than reading to learn something. I've been doing way too much silent reading, and though I rarely stop thinking about things, I've been doing way too little writing and processing.