Education, Learning, Repetition

As a generalisation it is fair to say that education describes a set of techniques aimed at forcing people to recall unimportant information. Within the world of education it is also fair to say that spaced repetition is effective - as are tests and other forms of intimidation. But judged as a whole this is a peculiar and inefficient activity - our minds were not designed for it, and it says almost nothing about normal learning.

Spaced repetition is an interesting case in point: Ebbinghaus (1885) famously discovered the forgetting curve, and subsequently that spaced repetition can reduce forgetting. But the flaw in his studies is always missed: the information was garbage. His studies concerned trigrams - three characters chosen at random (such as 'DXR'). Unimportant information. And human learning is designed to discard unimportant information. So these were never really studies of learning (or memory) - these were studies of education.

If we turn to learning the story is different: the vast majority of things we learn, we learn at once. A little introspection supports this  - think back to your own formative learning experiences, were they things you repeated over and over again? (if you are thinking of 'muscle memory' then this certainly does improve with practice. Things like learning how to ride a bike or speak a language require practice.)

Spaced repetition is an attempt to force the mind to do something unnatural; and it is remarkable in its ineffectiveness: I still forget my phone number despite repeating it thousands of times. I practiced long division for years - and now can't recall how to do it. But on my first day at school, when someone asked me to 'close your eyes and open your mouth' and they put a dead bee in there, I remember that to this day. I remember Gus's grisly end in 'Breaking bad' - only watched it once. Can you imagine the evolution of a creature that didn't learn this way? Fifty times bitten, twice shy?

It is possible to turn education into learning. You just have to make the information meaningful. Whilst this may sound like an objectionably blunt analysis, it actually turns out to be an rich and complex direction: the basis of simulation, why youtube is a surprisingly effective learning tool, why the Oculus Rift is so promising.

There are of course a great many people in education striving every day to make things matter to the learners in front of them. Perhaps the majority. And it is not surprising that these are often the same people who have deep misgivings about the role of testing in education; whether intuitively or explicitly they understand that learning and education are not merely different things - that they may stand in opposition to one another.