Learning: Formal and otherwise

In the previous post, I tried to paint (and then poke at) a stereotypical picture of "book learning" vs. "real-world learning," also known as "street smarts" (except there aren't really any proper streets where Bill lives).  Which kind of learning is better?  Depends on which you think you have more of, of course.

Cognitive science is a well-studied discipline with many interesting results on learning and other activities of the mind.  One of its most significant results is that we don't have a single, general learning capacity, but a variety of learning mechanisms.  Learning to ride a bike is different from learning a language is different from learning people's names is different from learning calculus, etc.  There is good experimental evidence to support all this.

In the typical "book learning"/"real-world learning" dichotomy, formal education is held to be narrow and divorced from the world at large.  But formal learning is not a monolith.  Different subjects require different combinations of lecture, research, rote memorization, structured practice, unstructured practice and so forth.  Teaching calculus well is different from teaching the oboe well is different from teaching experimental chemistry well is different from teaching Shakespeare well.

But what is formal education, anyway?  Does it have to take place in a classroom or for course credit?  Coaching a sport well is a highly structured exercise with its own terminology and a well-developed body of theory and practice.  Likewise for apprenticing to a trade.  The very fact of a recognized trade implies a set of rules and conventions -- forms, in other words -- to be followed.  Formality is about such structures, not the particular venue for learning.

Even taking a broader view of formal learning, though, there is plenty going on outside those bounds.  Learning one's first language, or one's culture, or whether one likes bleu cheese, or the way to the grocery store, or the faces and names of friend and family, or how to walk -- these all happen even without codified rules or explicit teaching, and each has its own character (though learning language and learning culture tend to be closely intertwined).

To the extent it can even be made clearly, any distinction between formal and informal learning is exceedingly coarse grained compared to the mosaics that are actual minds and the intricate subdivisions within each category.  Ironically enough, it's science, putatively cold and reductionist, that has devleoped and provided support for this basic insight.