Filling the Swiss Cheese Holes

A major problem with our current one-size-fits-all education is the gaps that occur in learning. Thirty or forty kids are presented with material at one time. They may work on some problems or research one topic, but then the instructor moves on. Those who don’t get it fall behind. Even those who do get most of the material, move on with what Salman Khan calls Swiss-cheese-like holes in their learning.

Khan has the solution for filling the holes. It is a technological solution, as many before him have promoted, but this one may stick in certain subjects.

Teaching versus Learning versus Doing

Much ink has been spilled for decades over the concepts of teaching, learning, and doing, producing such commonplaces as “learning by doing is the best way to learn” and “let’s focus on learning, not teaching.” A couple of clarifications, however, need to be made about both of these remarks.

Consider the first one. Learning and doing, epistemologically and psychologically, are two different mental processes. They never occur precisely at the same time. Learning is the acquisition of knowledge, doing is application. Acquisition is generalization, application is deduction from the general to employ the deduction in a specific concrete situation. A child learns the generalization of balance, of shifting one’s weight, when riding a bicycle. The child applies that knowledge in practice to perfect the skill. Learning comes before doing, perhaps from a parent or older sibling who is teaching the concept of balance or through trial-and-error learning. Sometimes it might occur a split second before the doing but it still comes before.

Trial-and-error learning proceeds in this manner. Try one thing. It doesn’t work. Try something else. It doesn’t work. But there may be similarities in the two actions that did not work sufficient to make a primitive generalization. Deduction from the generalization then follows to try a new action. It doesn’t work perfectly, but it works better than the previous failures. More trial, error, generalization, deduction, and further trial then ensue. Some learners are quick to pick up through observation what has to be done to execute a new skill; others are not. The point, however, is that ideas—no matter how primitive or unformed, or even how unaware the actor may be of the ideas—precede action. Add to this that ingrained mental and/or physical habits may have to be challenged and changed before the skill can be developed.

The significance of teaching before doing is to save the time that can be wasted when going through repeated efforts of trial and error. It also may prevent injury that can result from uninformed trial and error, such as, without instruction, learning to ride a bicycle or operate a complicated piece of machinery. “Learn-by-doing”—when understood to mean practice—is essential to perfecting a skill, mental or physical, but mental understanding, even of a mental skill like logical thinking, comes first.

This takes us to the comment about focusing on learning, not teaching. To teach, however, means to effect learning, to see to it that the students understand and can apply what has been taught. Even the standard definition of teaching—the transfer of knowledge from one person to another—indicates that teaching is not achieved until learning has been accomplished.

Some of the desire, no doubt, to emphasize learning over teaching comes from distrust of the lecture as a legitimate teaching method, but a well crafted lecture framed in essentials and delivered with conviction can effect a great deal of learning in its listeners. More generally, the comment most likely stems from the tired indifference to teaching and learning, not to mention overt rudeness, exhibited by many tenured teachers and professors. The state-run school and university systems do not cater to the needs and wants of their customers. Yet that is precisely what the focus on learning means.

In marketing—and teachers, as I have written before, are sales reps—a notion called the “marketing concept” says that everyone in the company, from the president to the stock boy, should not make any decision or take any action without first considering its effects on the customer. “We are no longer in the business of selling what we make,” General Electric said many years ago, “but making only what we can sell.” This means, quite simply, whether one is a writer, a teacher, or a sales rep: “know thy audience.” Know where the students are now in the learning process, then challenge them by stretching. But the stretching cannot go too far because that produces discouragement and it cannot be too elementary because that creates boredom. Finding the middle ground is what teaching to effect learning is all about. It is not an easy task. It requires constant observation of the students and adaptation to the their needs.

Focusing on learning is what every good teacher should routinely do. Teaching and learning are separate activities, performed by different people. The teacher teaches, the learner learns. But the teacher knows what and how to teach by first tuning into the learner. Anything else is whistling in the wind.

“You Can Get It in the Book”

Many years ago, while being interviewed by a dean for an academic position, I became engaged in a discussion of the philosophy of education. The dean tossed out as if it were self-evident: “The lecture has been obsolete for 500 years, since the invention of the printing press. Students can read the book.” His assumption was that lectures were needed in the pre-printing press era when books were rare and expensive, but not today when they are plentiful.

While it is true that with careful reading and study one can “get it in the book,” this neglects differences between written and oral presentations, between reading and speaking. These differences give rise to the true benefit of the lecture and explain why it has not died out in 500 years.

The average rate of reading with comprehension by an adult is about 250-300 words per minute. The average speaking speed of politicians is 120-25 words per minute, and CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite spoke at the exact rate per minute of 124 words. Casual conversation is often faster, but the point about the lecture is that formal oral presentations are delivered at half the rate, or less, of the average reading speed.

This means that less information can be presented orally in one minute than what can be read in the same amount of time. Less information in an oral presentation means essentialization. A lecture that essentializes a text makes it easier for the listener to grasp the main points of the written content. With the main points in hand, the listener can then pursue a more detailed study of the written material without first having to read at length to separate the essential from the nonessential. The advantage of the lecture is its efficiency; it saves time.

Whether the speaker deliberately essentializes the presentation or not, the listener hears it as essentialized, as important. The detail in the text is understood as detail. This means that it matters what gets selected as essential in the oral presentation. It makes the difference between good, bad, and indifferent lectures.

The efficiency of the lecture, of course, can also be achieved in conversation with an expert or mentor. The real advantage of the lecture is its ability to broadcast large amounts of essentialized material to many listeners at one time. Does this mean that everyone in the audience learns and digests the material in exactly the same way, one hundred percent? Hardly.

The comprehension and learning of listeners to a lecturer is exactly analogous to the comprehension and appreciation of listeners to a string quartet concert. One member of the quartet’s audience might be tone deaf. The next might be a professional violinist from another group who frequently plays the same pieces as those being performed on stage. Similarly, some students in my classes come in with D-’s in their prerequisite courses. Others come in with A’s. Most are somewhere in between. Audience members—of lectures and string quartet concerts—take away from the experience what they want, and are able, to take away.

Fine tuning may or may not be desired. In education, it usually is, which is why Jacques Barzun declared, “A lecture is a sizing of the canvas in broad strokes. The fine brush
and palette knife must be used close up to finish the work of art” [1] and why Gilbert Highet argued that the only two methods of teaching are the lecture and tutorial [2].

The purpose and value of the lecture is mass communication. The purpose and value of the tutorial is personal communication and individual attention. Though some, perhaps many, of a lecturer’s audience may not absorb everything the lecturer intended, a few listeners may be motivated to study the subject in more detail, just as concertgoers may be stimulated to buy CD’s of the works performed and listen to them many times over in order to learn them thoroughly.

The lecture is part of the division of labor in education. The tutorial is the other part.


1. Teacher in America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), 39.
2. The Art of Teaching (New York: Vintage Books, 1950), chapter 3.