New York, NY: Doubleday/Random House, 2020. 352 pages. $28.95.
Sanjay Sarma, Vice President for Open Learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes two seemingly competing approaches to learning in his nonfiction book Grasp. The first, generally associated with the behaviorist Edward L. Thorndike, focuses on the acquisition of abstract information, then an evaluation of comprehension. Sarma describes this learning-through-repetition as the “inside-out approach.” Over the past century, this approach has prompted many facets of American schooling we now take for granted: grades, standardized tests, the winnowing of students into compartments based on their perceived capacities.
The scholar most associated with the second approach, John Dewey, emphasized the interests and motivations of the learner. This method, known as cognitive learning, eschews the sense that school learning is preparatory for some future life and in fact should be in pursuit of what seems inspiring to the learner at the time. This approach has the advantage of a more immediately rewarding sensation. It isn’t undertaken to succeed on a test or to advance the learner to some special educational compartment (advanced placement, college, graduate school). This approach focuses more on seat-of-the-pants learning, pragmatic problem-solving for specific projects. An expert is quoted in Grasp: “one cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one understands that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.”
Sarma is out to steer education away from the entrenched behaviorist approach and toward a more cognitive one where, he suggests, real learning happens. He argues that the behaviorist approach inherently leads to the selectivity of learners—the categorization of students into those with and without ability—in an unnecessary and counterproductive way:
This low-simmering state of dissonance runs hot whenever the machinery of standardization clashes against the reality of how learning actually works. As I’ve mentioned, the cognitive science of learning is a multilayered affair, comprising far more complexity than Thorndike’s base-level theories account for.
Yes, Sarma might argue, some students struggle to grasp the concepts of physics, but the reasons for this inability often range from unnecessarily abstract approaches to teaching, to a student’s stressful home life, to their disadvantaged background. To write off those who learn differently not only limits their future prospects, but it limits ours. In short, the more everyone learns, the more we prosper as a species. Sarma clarifies the relationship between the important elements of learning in a way that points to an entirely different system from the US’s prominent educational model:
In my mission to help more people develop a lifelong relationship with learning—expanding, along the way, our notion of who is worthy of educational investment—two systems-level research threads hold particular promise. One has to do with the physical architecture of memory storage in the brain. The other concerns how fundamental motivating drives, such as curiosity, intersect with those stored memories.
According to Sarma, the learner’s curiosity—that specific set of circumstances that draws them in—is a key to the learning process. It leads to associations with the learner’s unique memories and connections and thereby to the creation of new insights. If you’re not curious, you’re not engaged. If you’re not engaged, good luck learning.
So, what needs to happen in education to get away from our self-imposed behaviorist constructs and head toward more cognitive approaches? To start, a computer and self-motivation. For example, Sarma takes the reader on a tour of 42, a free institution in Silicon Valley that teaches the most motivated students advanced coding.
42’s admissions process took into account no test scores, no letters of recommendation, no overwrought essays or overstuffed transcripts. Instead, it accepted all comers into an intensive, twenty-eight-day trial period known as a piscine—French for “pool”—which permitted applicants to distinguish themselves solely through performance.
If the student makes the cut after those twenty-eight days, they have the opportunity to advance through twenty-one different coding levels of “mastery learning.” Not unlike a video game, they can’t go to level two until they’ve mastered level one. No student has yet to master all twenty-one levels. The most promising tend to opt out at some point for a job offer from Google or some other tech giant. They no doubt boast unparalleled skills, which they developed through highly relevant and applicable project work. It’s hard to imagine a better program for the tech-driven soul who just needs the right opportunity to show what they’ve got.
Sarma also chronicles the plight of Claire Wang, a thirteen year old with circus-like memory and intellectual skills accepted to Ad Astra, an institute founded by Elon Musk. It focuses on world-building in a way that addresses real world problems—such as wealth distribution—at the macro level.
If, at 42, you work your way through projects like a character in a first-person video game, at Ad Astra you often hover high above the game board, assuming the role of politicians, city planners, and business leaders.
Sarma is quick to point out that such opportunities as Ad Astra are open only to the most gifted people, and that the world-building of the program is very much its own bubble. Still, it offers some kind of template for moving from a behaviorist to a cognitive learning system.
I admit to some cynicism with regard to the ability of technology to solve any of these problems, and Sarma also gestures toward the fact that, so far, the tech world has mastered only the low-hanging fruit of goods delivery and keeping us in contact with second-cousins. His description of AltSchool, which involves filming students during class to get clues about how to improve their learning, strikes me as an evermore perverse attempt at techno fix. Consider another way to describe success in life: the student with the fewest cameras on them wins.
Over the past decade, a kind of compromise has emerged in these learning approaches in the form of a number of free or cheap online courses. These courses manage to teach what can be taught remotely, offering motivated folks in far off countries the chance to learn from the best via the internet. Sarma’s MIT is one of the leading practitioners of these courses, and some of their hundreds of thousands of online students manage to use these classes as stepping stones to MIT degrees. The process is far from ideal, but it teaches what it can to the people it can through communications tools available virtually for free. Not everyone who takes these rigorous courses manages to earn a degree, much less finish their course, but since when, Sarma suggests, did learning become synonymous with getting a degree or finishing a course? Answer that question, and you might find the problem with contemporary education. Sarma’s perspective offers a kind of solution to many problems in education, so long as you don’t mind more computer time.