Teachers learn eight principles of learning in the course of their certification training, which show us different ways of making information memorable. If you compare how religious leaders use them to make their religious stories memorable to how teachers use them in public school, you can see a number of ways that religious fundamentalists are competing against public school and winning. What can we do to turn the table and make public education more memorable than religious fundamentalism?
ACT I
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What’s the best way to tell a story? How you tell a story depends on what you’re trying to get people to hear.
Education tells stories in different ways. So do religions. People tell stories in other ways, like books and movies, and the evening news.
Being Human on Planet Earth is a story about everyone, so we need to be sure to tell it in ways everyone can hear. Different people respond well to different ways of telling stories. So we need to use them all.
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There are many different aspects to how people think, communicate, and interact with each other. Instructor training involves a lot of ways of looking at those from different angles.
A good place to start is called the Principles of Learning. There are eight of them. You can look them up on Wikipedia.
Readiness: When someone is curious about something they remember what they find out about it better than when they aren’t. When you ask someone a question it’s because you’re interested in the answer. That makes what they say easier to remember than when people tell you things at random.
Primacy: The ideas and experience people get first areeasier to remember than ideas and experience they get later.
Recency: Ideas that people have heard most recently are easier to remember than ideas they heard earlier. That’s why it’s easy to remember the first time you did something and it’s easy to remember yesterday. In between is where things get blurry.
Intensity: Ideas that are presented in ways that engage your senses more are easier to learn than ones that engage them less. Why do textbooks have pictures? Reading about an idea and seeing pictures of it makes it more memorable than just reading about it. Hearing your teacher talk about it and you and your classmates talking about it makes it even more memorable.
Effect: Ideas that have a powerful emotional effect on you are easier to remember than ones that don’t have as much emotional effect. This is why ideas that relate to something you care about are easier to remember than ideas that don’t relate to anything you care about.
Exercise: Ideas that you use are easier to remember than ideas you don’t use. This is why you have homework in math and music and foreign language classes, to practice what you’ve learned.
Freedom: Ideas that you want to learn are easier to learn than ideas someone tries to force you to learn. Why do you sign up for elective classes? When you can sign up for classes about things you’re interested in, you already have an advantage in learning them. If you feel like you’re being forced to take a class to be able to graduate, really all you’re doing is memorizing the material long enough to pass the class.
Requirements: Ideas are easier to learn when you have the necessary materials and prerequisite ideas. If you want to learn to play guitar, what do you need first? A guitar. And somewhere to play it. And it helps if you already know how to read music.
ACT II
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One good way to see what these mean is to compare different classes you’ve had, and think about how your teachers used them differently. Once you see how they’re used in school, think about ways to use them better.
One easy way is to find out how the things you’re learning in school can be used in real life. That’s the Principle of Effect, because it connects what you learn to things you care about.
Another is to find out how the things you’re learning now are going to help you learn more things in the future. That’s the Principle of Requirements, because ithelps you build up to learning bigger things.
Another way to see what these mean is to compare school to church. They both tell stories. They tell their stories for different reasons. But they both have the goal of trying to make their stories believable.
Teachers use these principles to make their stories memorable. So how do religious leaders use them to make their stories memorable? And how does that get in the way of people believing in scientific discoveries and historical events when they hear about them?
Why do so many people argue that the Big Bang, the Theory of Evolution, and climate change can’t be real because they’re not in The Bible? Why do people still argue that slavery wasn’t wrong because slavery is in The Bible? There’s a huge body of historical facts that show how badly and how arbitrarily slave catchers and slave owners had to hurt people to make the slave system function. People who say that slavery wasn’t wrong want us all to ignore those facts.
Why do people believe those stories? And how can we get people to believe in facts? Education is the goal of the education system. So we really should talk about things people do that create obstacles to education.
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What’s the Principle of Primacy? People tend to remember best the explanation for something they hear first.
When do children start hearing religious stories? And when do they start learning about science? Religious people usually feel their religions are important, so they start telling their children about religious ideas soon after they learn to talk. Let’s say about age three.
Even if you don’t grow up in a religious family, you find out about Christmas before you start kindergarten. How old are you by then? Five. Someone probably tells you about Christianity around then too.
What grade are you in when you start learning about science? Third or fourth?So eight or nine years old? Anyone who wants to undermine people’s belief in science has an advantage there.
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What’s the Principle of Readiness? That’s what teachable moments are. People tend to remember best the answers they get when they’re curious about something.
When do kids start asking why all the time? When they’re three or four. Not when they’re five or eight or nine.
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What’s the Principle of Recency? People tend to remember best ideas they’ve heard most recently.
That’s why it’s so hard to remember a lot of things when you come back from summer vacation. The rest of the year you don’t realize how much it helps you to remember ideas when you hear them every day.
If you hear religious stories all the time, it’s the same thing. It keeps the ideas fresh in your mind.
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What’s the Principle of Intensity? The more sensory input accompanies an idea, the easier it is to remember.
If you go to church, you put on some of your best clothes, you go to a building that’s bigger and fancier than your house, and has good acoustics, with a lot of other people who are wearing their best clothes, and you’re surrounded by paintings and sculptures and stained glass windows when you hear the stories. You sing songs and read passages from The Bible with all those other people. You see and hear a lot of different things in a lot of different ways that go along with the stories you hear.
Your teachers decorate your classrooms with things that relate to your classes. But do they decorate them as much as a church?
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What’s the Principle of Effect? The more emotionally powerful an idea is the easier it is to remember.
Religious stories are stories about people who do the right things being rewarded with eternal paradise in heaven and people who do the wrong things being punished with eternal suffering in hell.
You might feel that some of your classes in school are even more exciting than that. But at the same time, you can understand why stories about life being a constant choice between eternal paradise or eternal suffering could make those stories feel more important than any others to many people.
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What’s the Principle of Exercise? Using an idea helps people remember it.
That’s another reason you forget stuff over summer vacation. That’s also why if you use some of the ideas you learn in a class outside the class it helps you remember them.
People have many reasons for feeling like they use the ideas they learned from religious stories. Making good decisions and helping other people make good decisions are a couple of obvious ones.
If you feel like you always use the ideas you learned from religious stories, and feel like you don’t always use the ideas you learn in school, that makes religious stories more memorable. And if you feel that life is always a choice between eternal paradise or eternal suffering, you feel like you always use what you learn in church.
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What’s the Principle of Freedom? It’s easier for people to learn things they want to learn than things they don’t want to learn.
Some people like school better than church and some people like church better than school. If you want what religious stories offer you, that makes them the easiest for you to remember.
Religions offer people communities of like-minded people. And offer them eternal life in paradise, and to have the creator of the universe on their side. To many people that sounds like a very good offer.
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What’s the Principle of Requirements? People learn ideas best when they have all the equipment, supplies, opportunities, and ideas that are necessary to learn the new ideas.
This is why if you’re out sick from school for a week you have to catch up to be able to understand what’s happening in your classes anymore. Because what you’re learning this week builds up from what you learned last week.
Religious stories are really good at this. If your religion says that your god is a father figure, and he makes all the most important decisions, and you want him to be happy with you and you don’t want to make him angry, those are all ideas that a three year old can understand. That means as soon as children are old enough to start asking why all the time, you can explain all the main points of your religion to them.
You can introduce preschoolers to some of the things you learn in school, but not all of them. When English teachers have children, they have it easy. Because children who grow up hearing English learn it all by themselves. But what do chemistry teachers do when they have kids? Do they tell their three year olds about molecules?
ACT III
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In a number of ways, and for a number of reasons, teachers have been settling for second place when it comes to making the stories they tell in their classes memorable compared to religious stories. If religions are based on stories that three year olds can understand, and kids don’t start learning about science until they’re eight, teachers are giving the game away to religious fundamentalists.
That means telling a real story of Being Human on Planet Earth depends on starting with concepts that three year olds can understand andremember and build upon as they get older and learn more. All that diversity you see on Sesame Street is a good start.
Religious fundamentalists are going to have a serious problem with the idea that we should make education feel more real to people than religion. But should we ignore an opportunity like this just because a third of the people in the country feel it’s wrong for the rest of us to believe that we could think of a story that’s better than theirs? If all we do is talk about why people believe in different religions, we’re already telling a story that’s bigger than any one religion.
Every bad decision adults make could’ve been prevented if they’d learned something better earlier in their lives. That’s what education is for!
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If you want a good life hack for learning how to teach, or just to talk about education with your teachers, you can Google Aviation Instructor’s Handbook. It’ll give you a link to the Federal Aviation Administration’s website, and the free pdf of the national training manual for flight instructors.
Certified Flight Instructors learn the same foundation in education as every other certified teacher in America. The book is 200 pages, it’s written for people with high school educations, and it’s free. The examples they use are specific to aviation, but they also describe all the concepts in general terms.
Chapters 1, 9, and 10 are very specific to aviation, but you can ignore those. Chapters 2 – 8 are about general concepts of education, like the Principles of Learning.
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Part of making Being Human on Planet Earth the best story we have is communicating it in the best ways we can. People have different ways of communicating, and people are receptive to different ways of communicating. So we need to use all the ways of communicating to tell this story. The more people who help tell the story, and the more ways they do it, the better the story gets.
To make that happen, we need a story that’s easy to remember and easy to use, and that’s easy to write movies, novels, poetry, music, and children’s books about. If we start with a story we can tell in high school, people will see a lot of other ways to use it, and it will spread outward from there.
If you’re in high school you’re probably too young to vote. But have you ever thought about how many jobs there are in the adult world that require high school diplomas? So do all of the colleges. And you, and whatever stories you want to tell, spend five days a week in the gateway to all of that.