Harvard Goes Practical

It's only fitting that Harvard, the birthplace of pragmatism, is trying to reform its pedagogy by making learning more practical and "active". Here's the Boston Globe:

In his 2006 book, "Our Underachieving Colleges," Bok cited a study that found that students remembered only 42 percent of what they heard in a lecture by the end of the lecture and only 20 percent a week later. He argued that students learn far more when they are actively engaged in activities related to the course.

As an illustration of how to make learning more active, students in an art course might meet with performers or curators, Harvard professors said yesterday. In a cognitive neuroscience course, a student could write a paper about how research sheds light on the negotiations in a model United Nations.

Professors teaching general education courses should, as much as possible, apply the academic concepts they teach "to the solution of concrete problems, the accomplishment of specific tasks, and the creation of actual objections and out-of-classroom experiences," the report said.

I think this is a wonderful idea. My own experience is that I've only remembered those bits of academic knowledge that I've managed to build into my representation of the real world. Whether it was my Introduction to Statistics course, or that comp lit seminar on Borges, or that gigantic organic chemistry lecture, the few facts my hippocampus has remembered are those that I was able to place into a larger context, and embed into my ordinary experience. In other words, I learned what I could put to use.*

There's a perfectly good neurological explanation for this. As I argued in my recent Seed article, "How We Know": "What we end up knowing is what we can learn how to use. From the perspective of our brain, learning and doing are just two different verbs that refer to the same mental process." There's plenty of neural evidence to support this Dewey-esque model of learning, from the activity of mirror neurons to the memory reconsolidation that goes on during dreaming.

I'm not saying that universities should suddenly stop teaching facts. Facts are essential: you can't make organic chemistry or cognitive neuroscience practical until you know your molecules and brain regions. But it's also time that we admit that facts without context are instantly forgotten. That's just how our brain works.

PS. I also think there's a deep hunger for this sort of practical learning. It's no coincidence that the two most popular undergraduate courses at Harvard are Positive Psychology and Introduction to Economics.

*So I remember how to test for correlation, but the details of Bayesian reasoning are, unfortunately, long gone. I remember "Funes the Memorious," but forget what Borges thought of Neo-Platonism. And Orgo? Well, let's just say that I remember what Carbon is.