How do humans learn, and what does that mean for educational policy?
In her latest video to parents, Headmaster, Ms Elizabeth Stone spoke about what we know, and what we don’t, about human learning based on the findings of cognitive psychologists. One of the fundamental principles is that the more knowledge you start with, the more easily you will learn or, put another way, the efficiency of learning is dramatically affected by background knowledge.
Ms Stone commented: “If the quality of learning is a function of how much you already know, there are significant implications for education and education policy. First, those who are serious about maximising learning need to structure the curriculum really carefully. For children to learn at higher levels they must first be taught a broad, well-integrated base of background knowledge relevant to the subject. But this isn’t easy: if you make the curriculum narrow but very deep, then the benefit of having prior knowledge is tightly constrained.
"You can’t, for instance, just dedicate all your time to Maths and English, because the background knowledge acquired through History and Geography and Music and Languages and Science all helps children grasp new ideas about the world. Intelligent judgements have to be made, not just about whether particular knowledge is valuable (all knowledge is valuable), but about what can intentionally be used as building blocks."
Ms Stone continues: “But there are too many good things in the world to teach all of them in school. A more realistic approach is to accept that we are preparing young people for a lifelong exploration of the world, and that our job is to give them an excellent start. We don’t have to beat ourselves up for not delivering the end product by the age of 18.
“This is yet another advantage of Div. Because we can use it to introduce seminal ideas that provide a conceptual framework that underpins further learning across the curriculum. And the versatility and flexibility that come from being unexamined make it more useful than, say, doing another A-level or GCSE which is tightly constrained by the exam syllabus.
“The second implication for educational policy is that we need to be careful about how much of life-skills we try to fit into the timetable. There are endless calls for schools to deliver life skills, but the public debate never addresses the obvious question of what should be displaced to make room. Good educational policy is going to have to confront this challenge, rather than pretending that there is no opportunity cost.
“But in the meantime, here at Winchester, we are clear that doing the most important things well entails doing less of the rest, as good as those things are.”
Watch her video in full here
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