Learning and forgetting
From Alternative Education
Central to the idea of education, is a requirement to remember the things that have been learned. A scientific study of how people learn and how people remember has been conducted for at least the last century, and one of the most famous proponents of scientific understanding of remembering and forgetting is [Hermann Ebbinghaus].
The work of Ebbinghaus began with trying to get adults to remember lists of information. He was frustrated by the results of his early experiments, however, because the prior knowledge on any subject of his experimentees made a big difference to how easily they understood and retained the information that he gave them to remember.
He consequently spent a long time in producing lists of syllables which meant nothing in any language, and then performed experiments asking adults to remember these lists of "words". From this work came his theories of learning curves, forgetting curves, and lots of scientific endeavour since then along the same lines.
The difficulty is that these theories only obtain for information which makes no sense to the individual trying to learn it. Ideas about the capacity of people to learn new information derived from the work of Ebbinghaus often ignore this fact: that the learnng and forgetting curves only make sense if the information that you are trying to learn makes no sense, and does not fit within the context of your prior knowledge.
Despite the best efforts of academics everywhere to separate information from the real world and take it out of context, there are very few subjects which make no sense to the student, and which do not fit into the context of their prior information or experience, and therfore there is very little that will follow the pattern that was discovered and outlined by Ebbinghaus, despite the fact that the learning curve and ideas about how much a person can absorb at one sitting, are still universally quoted.
Most people know this to be true for themselves: their ability to learn and retain information when they do not understand it is vastly impaired when contrasted with their ability to learn and retain information they understand.
I am indebted for my knowledge on Ebbinghaus to Frank Smith's wonderful work The Book of Learning and Forgetting, which is very interesting and informative for everyone interested in both mainstream and alternative education. Caliandris 07:29, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
