Create to Learn

Here's an illustration made around 1900-1910 about what they thought the classroom would be in the year 2000. On the right, there is a teacher that is feeding books into a machine that is hooked up to all of the students which are uniformly sat in desks. There is a teacher assistant cranking the machine to get it to download the information into the students.

125 years later, and students around the world are still dreaming of a machine to just download the information into the brains. Is this because this is actually how we learn or is it the case that we have a misconception about how we learn?

Our current conception of learning is to memorize to learn which is embedded at the heart of school. In school, everyone is given the same goal which is to do well on the test. In order to do well on the test, the students have to prove they can regurgitate the information, and to do this they opt for memorization through repetition. The problem with this model is that it's not even used in real life. No one sits down and memorizes a ton of information as a way to learn because that is not how we learn.

The reason that no one learns this way is because we have a misconception about our brains. We think of our brains as solely hardware. This is why when we think of brain superpowers we think of unlimited memory or perfect retrieval of information. The issue with this is that it leaves out the software aspects such as consciousness and experience.

This is a similar misconception that was made by Lamarck when he was trying to explain how animals gained their traits. The mistake he made was thinking that the changes in the outer appearance of an animal came only from physical changes. For example, he would have said that the reason a giraffe's neck is long is because it would stretch its neck through the generations.

What he missed and what we now know from the theory of evolution is that the appearance of an animal derives from its genes. The gene is the unit that holds the information to express its physical traits, and it is by changing this unit that an animal changes. The way this unit changes is through random mutations that creates variations that give advantages to its holder which then gets selected for and passed on.

Likewise, what the hardware centric view of the brain misses is that the information is encoded in a unit in the brain called memes. Memes are like ideas, and it is through changing these memes that we come to change our behaviors. For example, based upon which religion you belong to, you would express a different behavior.

Much like genes, memes can also evolve. Memes can undergo variation through the use of human creativity. Some memes give its holders advantages, and so gets selected for. These memes go on to proliferate and spread. The way that this meme gets passed on to another person is that he or she will try to create the meme in their mind by making guesses and error correcting. If he or she is successful, understanding is established.

This tells us a few things about how we should be learning. Rather than trying to regurgitate localized facts, we should leaning into creating to learn. Secondly, because creating to learn requires that we start at the level of memes, learning must take into account what the student knows and his or her interests. Lastly, instead of measuring for replication of information, we should be measuring for the effects of the creation of memes such as understanding, transformation, or improvement.