by David Brooks
She didn’t so much teach them as apprentice them. Much unconscious learning is done through imitation. She exhibited a way of thinking through a problem and then hoped her students participated along with her.
She forced them to make mistakes. The pain of getting things wrong and the effort required to overcome error creates an emotional experience that helps burn things into the mind.
She tried to get students to interrogate their own unconscious opinions. Making up your mind, she believed, is not like building a wall. It’s more a process of discovering the idea that already exists unconsciously. She wanted kids to try on different intellectual costumes to see what fit.
She also forced them to work. For all her sentimentality, she did not believe in the notion that students should just follow their natural curiosity. She gave them homework assignments they did not want to do. She gave them frequent tests, intuitively sensing that the act of retrieving knowledge for a test strengthens the relevant networks in the brain. She pushed. She was willing to be hated.
Ms. Taylor’s goal was to turn her students into autodidacts. She hoped to give her students a taste of the emotional and sensual pleasure discovery brings—the jolt of pleasure you get when you work hard, suffer a bit, and then something clicks. She hoped her students would become addicted to this process. They would become, thanks to her, self-teachers for the rest of their days. That was the grandiosity with which Ms. Taylor conceived of her craft.
The Hunt
Harold found Ms. Taylor absurd for the first few weeks and then unforgettable forever after. The most important moment of their relationship came one afternoon as Harold was moving from gym class to lunch. Ms. Taylor had been lurking in the hallway, camouflaged in her earth tones against the lockers. She spotted her prey approaching at normal speed. For a few seconds, she stalked him with a professional calm and patience, and then during a second when the hallway crowds parted and Harold was vulnerable and alone, she pounced. She pressed a slim volume into Harold’s hand. “This will lift you to greatness!” she emoted. And in a second she was gone. Harold looked down. It was a used copy of a book called The Greek Way by a woman named Edith Hamilton.
Harold would remember that moment forever. Later, Harold would learn that The Greek Way has a tainted reputation among classicists, but in high school, it introduced him to a new world. It was a world alien yet familiar. In classical Greece, Harold found a world of combat, competition, teams, and glory. Unlike in his own world, he found a world in which courage was among the highest virtues, in which a warrior’s anger could propel history, in which people seemed to live in bold colors. There was little in Harold’s milieu that helped him come into his own masculinity, but classical Greece provided him a language and set of rules.
Edith Hamilton’s book also introduced him to a sensation that he had not experienced before, of being connected to something ancient and profound. Hamilton quoted a passage from Aeschylus: “God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” Harold did not fully understand that passage, but he sensed that somehow it carried an impressive weight.
He followed Hamilton’s book with others, reading on his own, in search of that sensation of connecting with something mystical across the ages. He had always studied and paid attention in the manner of a professional student, in order to get into the sort of college he would be proud to mention at parties. But he began to read about Greece in a different way, with a romantic yearning to discover something true and important. He read this material out of a sense of need. He went on to read popular histories. He saw movies about ancient Greek life (most of them bad), such as 300 and Troy. In a high-school fashion, he dipped into Homer, Sophocles, and Herodotus.
Ms. Taylor watched all this with exuberant attention, and one day they met during a free period to chart a plan of study.
It started, of course, under bare fluorescent lights, in a normal classroom, while she and Harold sat at desks slightly too small for their own legs. Harold had decided, or been cajoled, into doing his senior honors paper on some as yet undetermined aspect of ancient Greek life, and Ms. Taylor was going to be his faculty advisor. So Harold sat there listening to her as she went on excitedly about the project ahead. Her enthusiasm was contagious. It was fun to talk with her one-on-one. Studies of language acquisition have found that the quickest learning comes from face-to-face tutoring. The slowest learning comes from video- or audiotapes. Plus, there was something alluring about having a smart, attractive older woman talking about a mystery of intense interest to him.
Ms. Taylor’s theory about Harold was that he was a popular, athletic high-school boy who also showed flashes of idealism. She’d noticed it in their classroom discussions—a desire for loftiness, a desire to be part of something higher than normal life. Ms. Taylor had originally given Harold that Hamilton book because the ancient Greeks offer boys a vision of greatness that seemed to inspire them. When they met, she suggested that Harold write his senior paper linking classical Greek life to some aspect of high-school life. Ms. Taylor was a big believer in the idea that creativity comes when two disparate fields crash in one mind, like two galaxies merging in space. She was a big believer in the notion that everybody should have two careers, two perspectives for looking at the world, each of which provided insights into the other. In her case, she was a teacher by day and, less successfully but not less important, a singer-songwriter by night.
Step One
The first stage of Harold’s project would be knowledge acquisition. Ms. Taylor told him to keep reading books about Greek life and bring her back a list of five he had read. She didn’t give him an organized curriculum; she wanted him to find these books the way adults find books when they get interested in a subject, by browsing Amazon or the bookstore—by word of mouth and by chance. She wanted him to get information from different kinds of books and different kinds of authors so that his unconscious would actively work to weave it all together.
In the first stage, it didn’t matter if Harold’s research was a little dilettantish. Benjamin Bloom has found that teaching doesn’t have to be brilliant right away: “The effect of this first phase of learning seemed to be to get the learner involved, captivated, hooked, and to get the learner to need and want more information and expertise.” So long as Harold was curious and enjoying his quest, he’d be developing a feel for Greek life, a certain base level of knowledge about how the Athenians and the Spartans lived, fought, and thought. This concrete knowledge would serve as the hook upon which all subsequent teaching would be hung.
Human knowledge is not like data stored in a computer’s memory banks. A computer doesn’t get better at remembering things as its database becomes more crowded. Human knowledge, on the other hand, is hungry and alive. People with knowledge about a topic become faster and better at acquiring more knowledge and remembering what they learn.
In one experiment, third graders and college students were asked to memorize a list of cartoon characters. The third graders had much better recall, because they were more familiar with the subject matter. In another experiment, a group of eight- to twelve-year-olds who had been classified as slow learners and a group of adults with normal intelligence were each asked to recall a list of pop stars. Again, the younger, “slow learners” did much better. Their core knowledge improved performance.
Ms. Taylor was helping Harold lay down some core knowledge. Harold read about the Greeks whenever he had the chance. At home. On the bus. After dinner. This made a difference. Many people believe you should set aside a specific place to do your reading, but a large body of research shows that people retain information better when they alternate from setting to setting. The different backgrounds stimulate the mind and create denser memory webs.
After a few weeks, he came back with five books he had read—popular histories of the battle
s of Marathon and Thermopylae, a biography of Pericles, a modern translation of the Odyssey, and a book comparing Athens to Sparta. These books, willy-nilly, filled in his picture of the life, values, and the world of ancient Greece.
Step Two
In their second session, Ms. Taylor praised Harold for his hard work. Researcher Carol Dweck has found that when you praise a student for working hard, it reinforces his identity as an industrious soul. A student in this frame of mind is willing to take on challenging tasks, and to view mistakes as part of the working process. When you praise a student for being smart, on the other hand, it conveys the impression that achievement is an inborn trait. Students in that frame of mind want to continue to appear smart. They’re less likely to try challenging things because they don’t want to make mistakes and appear stupid.
Then Ms. Taylor told Harold to go back and look over everything he had read so far, starting with the Edith Hamilton book that had been his first entry into Greek life. Ms. Taylor wanted Harold to automatize his knowledge. The human brain is built to take conscious knowledge and turn it into unconscious knowledge. The first time you drive a car, you have to think about every move. But after a few months or years, driving is done almost automatically. Learning consists of taking things that are strange and unnatural, such as reading and algebra, and absorbing them so steadily that they become automatic. That frees up the conscious mind to work on new things. Alfred North Whitehead saw this learning process as a principle of progress: “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
Automaticity is achieved through repetition. Harold’s first journey through his Greek books may have introduced him to his subject, but on his second, third, and fourth journeys, he would begin to entrench it deep down. Ms. Taylor had told her students a hundred times that it is far better to go over material for a little bit, repetitively, on five consecutive nights than it is to cram in one long session the night before an exam. (No matter how often she repeated this point, this was one lesson her students never seemed to automatize.)
Ms. Taylor wanted Harold to slip back into the best learning rhythm. A child in a playroom instinctively understands how to explore. She starts with Mom, and then ventures forth in search of new toys. She returns to Mom for security and then repeats her ventures forth. Then it’s back to Mom and out again to explore.
The same principle applies to learning in high school and beyond. It is a process of what Richard Ogle, the author of Smart World, calls reach and reciprocity. Start with the core knowledge in a field, then venture out and learn something new. Then come back and reintegrate the new morsel with what you already know. Then venture out again. Then return. Back and forth. Again and again. As Ogle argues, too much reciprocity and you wind up in an insular rut. Too much reach and your efforts are scattershot and fruitless. Ms. Taylor wanted to slip Harold into this rhythm of expansion and integration.
Harold groaned when she told him to read everything again. He thought he’d be bored out of his mind, going back and reading the same books he’d already finished. He was stunned to find that the second time through they were different books. He noticed entirely different points and arguments. Sentences he had highlighted seemed utterly pointless now, whereas sentences he had earlier ignored seemed crucial. The marginalia he had written to himself now seemed embarrassingly simpleminded. Either he or the books had changed.
What had happened, of course, is that as he had done more reading; he had unconsciously reorganized the information in his brain. Thanks to a series of internal connections, new aspects of the subject seemed important and old aspects, which had once seemed fascinating, now seemed mundane. He had begun to inhabit the knowledge differently and see it in a new way. He had begun to develop expertise.
Harold was not a real expert in ancient Greek history, of course, or ready for his exams at Oxford. But he had crossed the white-belt threshold of expertise. He had come to see that learning is not entirely linear. There are certain breakthrough moments when you begin to think of and see the field differently.
The easiest way to understand this is to examine the expertise that chess grandmasters possess. In one exercise, a series of highly skilled players and a series of nonplayers were shown a series of chessboards for about five to ten seconds each. On each board twenty to twenty-five pieces were arrayed, as if in an actual game. The participants were later asked to remember the positions on the board. The grandmasters could remember every piece on every board. The average players could remember about four or five pieces per board.
It is not that the chess grandmasters were simply a lot smarter than the others. IQ is, surprisingly, not a great predictor of performance in chess. Nor is it true that the grandmasters possess incredible memories. When the same exercise was repeated, but the pieces were arrayed randomly, in a way that did not relate to any game situation, the grandmasters had no better recall than anyone else.
No, the real reason the grandmasters could remember the game boards so well is that after so many years of study, they saw the boards in a different way. When average players saw the boards, they saw a group of individual pieces. When the masters saw the boards, they saw formations. Instead of seeing a bunch of letters on a page, they saw words, paragraphs, and stories. A story is easier to remember than a bunch of individual letters. Expertise is about forming internal connections so that little pieces of information turn into bigger networked chunks of information. Learning is not merely about accumulating facts. It is internalizing the relationships between pieces of information.
Every field has its own structure, its own schema of big ideas, organizing principles, and recurring patterns—in short, its own paradigm. The expert has absorbed this structure and has a tacit knowledge of how to operate within it. Economists think like economists. Lawyers think like lawyers. At first, the expert decided to enter a field of study, but soon the field entered her. The skull line, the supposed barrier between her and the object of her analysis, had broken down.
The result is that the expert doesn’t think more about a subject, she thinks less. She doesn’t have to compute the effects of a range of possibilities. Because she has domain expertise, she anticipates how things will fit together.
Step Three
Ms. Taylor’s third step was to help bring Harold’s tacit knowledge of Greek life to the surface. After the weeks of reading, and then more weeks of rereading, she asked him to keep a journal. In it he would describe both his thoughts about Greek life and his own time in high school. She told him to let his mind go free, to let his thoughts bubble up from his unconscious, and to not worry for the time being about what he was writing or how good it might be.
Her basic rule was that a student should be 75 percent finished with a paper before he sits down to write it. Before composition starts, there should be a long period of gestation, as he looks at the material in different ways and in different moods. He should give his mind time to connect things in different ways. He should think about other things and allow insights to pop into his head. The brain doesn’t really need much conscious pushing to do this. It is such an anticipation machine, it is always and automatically trying to build patterns out of data. A telephone transmits only 10 percent of the tones in a voice, and yet from that, any child can easily build a representation of the person on the other end of the line. This is what the brain does easily and well.
Ms. Taylor wanted Harold to write a journal because she wanted Harold to retrieve the knowledge that was buried inside in as frictionless a way as possible. She wanted him to go off on a reverie, and convert the intuitions he had developed into language. She was a firm believer in Jonah Lehrer’s dictum “You know more than you know.” She wanted to give him an exercise that would allow him to wander around the problem in a way that might seem haphazard and wasteful, because the mind is often most productive when it is the most carefree.
Harold would save that journal for the rest of his li
fe, though he was always tempted to burn it because he didn’t want his descendents to see his overwrought adolescent musings. At first he would just write a word in the center of a page and then scribble the ideas or thoughts that popped into his head in a cluster around it, and sometimes a peripheral thought would become the center of its own cluster.
He wrote a lot about the passions of Greek heroes. He compared the anger of Achilles to his own anger at various situations, and in his telling he came off as the slightly more heroic character of the two. He wrote a lot about courage, and copied down a passage Edith Hamilton wrote about Aeschylus: “Life for him was an adventure, perilous indeed, but men are not made for safe havens.”
He wrote about pride, copying Aeschylus’s own passage, “All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears. God calls men to a heavy reckoning for overweening pride.” He tended to be the hero of his own stories, feeling more and seeing better than his classmates. But at his best, the Greek passages did lift him up and give him a sense of profound connection to an age long past and men and women long dead. “I make honorable things pleasant to children,” one Spartan teacher boasted, and this contact with excellence inspired Harold. He experienced a feeling of historical ecstasy late one night reading and writing a journal entry about Pericles’ funeral oration. He began to share the Greek sense of the dignity and significance of life. He also began, especially in his later journal passages, to make judgments and connections. He wrote one passage about the difference between the warlike Achilles and the subtle Odysseus. He began to notice the ways in which he was different from the Greeks. There were troubling passages where they seemed to lack all sympathy. They were great in expressing the competitive virtues—like seeking glory—but they were not so great when it came to the compassionate virtues—like extending a sympathetic hand to those suffering or in need. They seemed to lack an awareness of grace, of God’s love even for those who didn’t deserve it.