Learning in compartments
There is so much to take in that we divide up our task subject by subject, rarely allowing something we’ve learned in one class (or other environment) to leak over into another. This is not, in general, a good thing.
A character in Rober Lews Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped claims, at one point, to have “a grand memory for forgetting.” In the context of eighteenth-century Scotland, in the wake of the Jacobite Rebellions, this was not a bad skill. Indeed, in that troubled environment it could be a vital survival trait. Our tutoring consultant, understandably, is less enthusiastic about forgetting. During the current summer vacation students in the millions are busily engaged in forgetting last year’s learning, which will have to be gone over again somehow to make progress. But that’s not the kind of forgetting we want to address here.
Sometimes it is good to forget, in the form of laying aside things you already know. When taking up the rigorous study of geometry it is vital to ignore whatever you may have gathered from elsewhere, and proceed from axiom and stated assumption to proof. [Indeed, unstated assumptions abound in various attempts to prove Euclid’s Parallel Postulate. Eventually these were discarded, leading to non-Euclidean geometery and in time to General Relativity.] The lesson of stating explicitly the basis of your reasoning applies to many other fields, though honored more in the breach than in the observance.
Our tutor is much less enthusiastic about a certain standardized test covering Science. The test-makers are not (they say in so many words) attempting to measure the students’ background in the subject. Rather, they present a series of short expositions from various fields and use questions to measure the students’ ability to reason scientifically. Not only is it unnecessary to know anything about the subject; one may have to forget something already learned. It’s not unusual to have picked up some knowledge inconsistent with, or even contradictory to, the example given. Forgetting is necessary to avoid confusion (at best) and wrong answers (at worst).
The phenomenon appears in other standardized tests, where the intention is to measure some bit of mathematical or rhetorical ability rather than grasp of science. Our tutoring consultant remains unconvinced of its necessity.
In addition, it reinforces the already strong tendency for students to break up their schoolwork into sealed containers. “Chemistry 101” is everything taught (or everything testable) in that class; it is not applied elsewhere. This tidy division of knowledge makes teaching as performed in our schools possible, and answers teenagers’ need for order and system in the world. It does not apply to science, to knowledge in general, or to the world.
To their credit, teachers and curriculum designers try to break out. Our tutor has seen a number of attempts to get students to combine knowledge and techniques from two or several subjects, with varying success. And students themselves have made some connections. In beginning physics, students learn about displacement, velocity and acceleration; in beginning calculus, they are presented with the same things. One student of our tutor mentioned that, having learned these things in one class, he was already ahead in the other. It’s a start.
