The Miracle of Learning

I

RECENT years have cast a glamour over the doings of the abnormal mind which I, for one, am constrained to deplore. Ever since Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life set the wild echoes flying, the unconscious, the libido, the censor, suppressed sexual desires, organ inferiority, and sublimation have been words of power and wonder. And for many people psychology has figured as the drama of an uncanny realm of portents, the tale of how

All this pageantry and hurly-burly has distracted us from a range of phenomena not only far better attested, but also, I believe, far more truly amazing and deeply significant. These are the everyday phenomena of the learning process. To the discerning eye nothing is more fascinating and marvelous than the way in which the mind advances from weakness to power, from vagueness to precision, from halting clumsiness to refined accuracy, from the limited to the embracing view. Just because these things are so familiar we take them as commonplace. Yet, compared with the bombinations of popular psychopathology, they are true drama contrasted with melodrama. In psychology the seemingly commonplace is the truly wonderful. Here, to paraphrase the saying of Kipling, the true romance indeed ‘brings up the five-fifteen’ and too often goes ‘all unseen.’ Whenever we manage to learn anything, no matter how simple or how complex, a miracle has been achieved.

II

Speak of learning to most people and they think you are talking of something dull and humdrum. They have a vision of some patient creature endlessly repeating a string of digits or a series of nonsense words, or grinding away at a stupid physical coördination. But quite another picture should come before us. The story of Newton and the apple, apocryphal or no, is the archetype of all human learning. A flash of insight coördinates a great mass of material; a new pattern of ideas is born; a crystallization of things held in solution is achieved. Learning is not a routine, but a drama. Archimedes running naked from the bath with shouts of ϵυηκа is the type of the successful learner.

We quite wrongly assume that repetition is the key and cause of learning. This is probably the chief reason why we think it humdrum and commonplace. But the process depends on something utterly different — the wooing and incidence of the creative moment, the making of something not there before. Indeed, it should be evident that repetition cannot in the least explain learning.

Consider how the business starts. You are perhaps — Heaven help you — learning to play golf. You go out on the practice tee with fifty balls and proceed to swat them toward the waiting caddy. How many will go at all where you want to put them ? Let us be generous and say ten. Ten successes — forty dubs. If the repetition formula is correct, how do you ever improve your game? Why don’t you merely learn to dub, and dub more and more adequately as time goes on?

An experimental problem was set up in the laboratory which could be approached in 1024 different ways. Of these, 1023 were wrong and led to failure; one was right. And yet the right way was learned, and the wrong ways discarded. Ten hundred and twenty-three chances for practice to make imperfect, yet perfection arrived. Why?

A psychologist found that he was developing a persistent bad habit in his typewriting. He constantly wrote ‘ the ’ as ‘h-t-e.’ Being a good behaviorist and a sensible person, he took himself firmly in hand and practised a great many ‘t-h-e’s.’ It did no good; still the mistake hung on. Then he had a thought: he deliberately practised ‘h-t-e’ — and the difficulty evaporated. Practise worked in reverse. He learned the thing he did n’t practise. Why?

So far from its being true that we learn by repetition or by doing, repetition is absolutely incapable of accounting for learning. When I start a new piece on the piano I can’t play it; when I first try to write poetry I find I can’t write it; when I undertake to drive my initial golf ball I can’t drive it. The thing is simply not there at all. What sense is there in telling me that I learn to do something by continually doing it when I can’t do it anyhow? Consider a child learning to speak English. Can he speak English or not? Yes or no? Clearly no! Then on what is he practising? Surely not on the English language. How could he?

Repetition cannot in the least explain the beginnings of any job of learning, simply because the thing to be learned is always something new, not something already there. No more can it explain the development and continuation of the process. One of the oldest though still among the best experiments on this subject dealt with learning to send and receive the Morse Code on the telegraph instrument. The first job of the pupil was to master the separate letters. This took a long time, but finally he had it. Still for a long while he made no progress. He knew the letters, but the higher speeds and higher masteries were far beyond him. He plodded over an interminable plateau. Then, on a propitious day, he suddenly began to write words — whole words all together. Again a long pause in progress — then suddenly entire phrases.

Now notice this — the mastery of the letters grew no better. Far down the line it was already as good as it ever could be. For progress an entirely new integration must come in. Whence did it come? From the letters? How could it? Apparently out of the everywhere !

An enormous amount of our learning shows this mysterious and creative rhythm. The first time I drive a car I glance anxiously hither and yon, and take all sorts of pains with the levers; I stall my engine at the traffic lights, and go in the ditch to avoid another vehicle when there is plenty of room. Later on I notice only a few things in the shifting traffic pattern and am hardly aware of the car’s mechanism — and I am fairly safe. The beginning golfer thinks of twenty matters with keen anxiety — and tops the ball.

Bobby Jones steps up with only one thing in his mind’s eye, but that one thing perfectly clear, and the ball sails two hundred and fifty yards down the fairway. The wretch ‘ unaccustomed to public speaking ’ memorizes every word, forgets half of them, and looks, sounds, and feels subhuman. Lloyd George faces the Limehouse audience with a hundred words roughly jotted on a card, and achieves a triumph. How do these changes come about? What makes us stop being anxious about many things, and fashion a new and more excellent way? Whence this new pattern of attention and behavior?

Of course, in our easy fashion, we say that the routines have become ‘automatic,’ through repetition. But this misses the whole point. Automatic routines never created first-rate skill. One may know every rule of grammar perfectly without being able to write good style — though style is simply applied grammar. One may be as familiar with the Morse letters as one ever can be, and still remain bad at sending and worse at receiving. Wherever the secret is to be found, it is not here. Macaulay could read a page in the time most of us need for a sentence, but did he know the alphabet better than you or I? Superior controls, more effective patterns of behavior, new directions of the attention, must emerge, or there is no improvement. And, just because these things are brand-new, they cannot be what we are practising.

If repetition were really the key to learning, then the more we repeated anything the better we should learn it. But this is very often not the case. A group of children practised a certain simple skill for eighteen days; then half of them went on practising for seventy-six days longer, after which the others, who in the meantime had done nothing, joined them; and within ten days there was no difference at all between the two halves of the group. Overlearning persistently refuses to behave in a common-sense way. It is a broken reed, a fickle and dangerous device. The everlasting plodder may be defeating his own ends.

Learning is precisely not the wearing down of a pathway in the nervous system, the repetitive establishment of a routine. So far from being the formation of habit, it requires a breach with established ways of doing and thinking, and the substitution of better ways. Improvement is in the truest and most accurate sense a creative process. Long ago Plato perceived this. How, he asked himself, can anything absolutely new come into our minds? It seems to whenever we learn, whenever we recombine our ideas or improve our skills. He found this impossible, and replied that indeed we never learn anything, but only recollect what is already implicitly known. Here, as so often happens, our most recent science confirms the insight of that profound mind, and we are confronted in this latter day with something amazingly akin to the ancient doctrine of άνάμνησις.

III

To invoke Plato’s doctrine of reincarnation as an explanation of learning, and to say that whenever we seem to learn a new thing we merely recapture the visions of a previous existence, would certainly strike us as a counsel of scientific despair. But psychology has not yet really done very much better in the way of an ultimate account. Still, one consideration of major importance stands out in recent research: learning appears to be a function of the will.

Two groups were put to work at memorizing the same material. They both made the same number of repetitions. The first group was told to learn with an intent permanently to retain the material; no such instructions were given to the second. Five minutes after practice, no difference to amount to anything was discernible; both knew the stuff about equally well. Yet a fortnight later the first group showed an indisputable superiority. Once again two groups were put to work at learning. One was stimulated by powerful motives, among them a money reward; the others just drilled. It was found that the first group completed the job in half the number of repetitions required by the latter. A very ingenious experiment was devised in which the subjects had to solve complex puzzles — to learn a type of thinking, that is to say. The crux of success was found to be the presence of a strong determination, a certain dynamic, attacking attitude of mind. It is not plodding, it is not routine, that builds the new structure, apparently out of nothing. Will is the creative force. Without the will to learn there is no learning. And when the will is feeble and confused, learning lags.

Notice that the master key is not the wish but the will to learn. The will must be pointed and organized. We must endeavor not merely to improve in general, but to learn just these things for just this purpose. We must have a clear-cut goal, a limited objective. A bunch of carrots must often be dangled before the donkey’s nose.

Frequently we need to hire a teacher to do the dangling. And he earns his pay by choosing the right carrots and dangling them with the proper skill. Whether we put ourselves under another person or do our own teaching, a very large part of the art consists in establishing the proper goals of effort, in showing us what we ought to work for, and how to work for it. Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas, and the task of all worth-while teaching is to hasten and assure the coming of the creative moment of improvement.

Now there are clumsy and stupid and also wise and skillful ways of organizing the will to learn. For instance, it has been experimentally established that to blame the learner for failure, to bully and scold and nag, is thoroughly bad. We know that if a teacher really wishes to direct the dynamics of learning, rather than just to release his own pentup Uticas, the worst possible thing he can do is to indulge in sarcasm. All such procedures tend to disintegrate, confuse, and stultify the learner’s will. They make for chaos, not cosmos; they amount to saying fiat obscurum rather than fiat lux. The encouragement of success, the appreciation of effort — these are the things that pay. Suspect any teacher who deals habitually in the coin of condemnation; and if you teach with yourself as pupil, do not, as you value your progress, be daunted by failure.

Some curious discoveries have been made concerning the incentives which help learning most. For instance, a great many things are learned most rapidly and surely in the company of other learners rather than alone. This is true not only of physical but also of many mental skills, such as memorizing or solving problems or doing sums. The mere sight of others busy points up the will to learn. Again, one of the surest ways of getting a job of learning well and quickly done is to offer a dime for its completion. Perhaps the ideal school of the future will have a treasury of dimes for inspirational purposes! Hypnotism has been tried as an aid to learning, with uncertain results, though students at Cambridge hypnotized the night before an examination and instructed to remember excelled themselves next day in their papers. Another and more normal way of directing the will is to arrange a situation where we become aware of our success or lack of it. In the good old days of financial drives a common stimulus was the big thermometer which showed the steady rise of the fund. The same sort of thing should be provided for the learner — a record in which he sees his own progress, and knows whether he is moving, and how fast.

The will to learn seems capable of triumphing over the most astonishing obstacles. It can triumph over fatigue. There is abundant evidence that one can go on and on with the most exacting mental tasks with astonishingly little decline in efficiency. Even after a job of work has become acutely distasteful, it still remains possible to go on doing it well. Indeed, the suggestion has been made in highly responsible quarters that there is no such thing as mental fatigue at all, in the sense of sheer literal inability to produce any more results as a consequence of continuous work. What we usually call mental fatigue is commonly a combination of tired eyes, an aching back, and a violent wish to do something else. When we want to stop we salve our consciences by saying that we can’t continue.

Again, the will to learn can triumph over age. Few psychological dogmas have been more easily swallowed than the notion that we learn best when we are young; but it is entirely unsubstantiated by ascertained fact. We assume it to be true, not because we are aware of any proof, but merely because we have been told many times that it is so, and because to believe it comports so well with the besetting laziness and timidity of mankind. On the contrary, however, there is excellent reason to hold that a man of thirty, forty, or even fifty can learn nearly anything better than he could when he was fifteen. To many readers this may seem heresy so violent that I hasten to bulwark myself behind authority. Professor E. L. Thorndike, in his book, Adult Learning, has brought together all the investigations ever made on learning at advanced ages. He finds no scintilla of evidence for the notion that children learn better than adults because of the flexibility of their muscles or the plasticity of their minds. A child of ten can acquire almost any technique better than when he was six. A man in his thirties or forties can acquire almost anything quite as well as he could in his teens — and probably better. This applies even to learning a new language. As far as the psychological processes themselves go, it would be better to attend school between the ages of twenty and thirty-two than between the ages of six and eighteen. The only difficulty would be that of earning a living.

Why, then, do so many adults give up learning new things? Here is the point for our discussion. They stop learning because of a subtle but fatal disintegration of the will to learn. To begin something new at an elementary level seems to them queer, even shameful. The cares of life enmesh them. Or, like E. F. Benson’s Lucia, they begin to feel a little vecchio. The feeling, not the fact, is the poison. All such resignations, despairs, and distastes are the death of that creative impulse which is the heart of learning. They are not among the inevitabilities of life; we yield ourselves to them ‘through the weakness of our own feeble wills.’

The only obstacle which can definitely defeat the will to learn is stupidity. And this is natural enough, because stupidity is the inability to take a situation apart, and to recognize the key logs of the jam. This means an obliteration of all goals, a breakdown of organization. The wish to learn may be strongly felt, but it takes planning and direction to transmute the wish into effective will.

Stupidity not only varies in degree; also it is of many kinds. For instance, there is the specific or limited stupidity which afflicts even the most brilliant. The learning studies have continually revealed a factor which most of us can recognize only too painfully well in ourselves. This is called ‘the persistence of error.’ One experiment required learners to disentangle wire puzzles — labyrinths of wire on which hung a key detachable by obscure manipulations. Time and again a worker would get the key up into one corner where it could not possibly be detached, and fumble and twist with the persistence of an insect on a windowpane. Often the director would stop and give aid. He would point out the hopelessness of the blind alley, and suggest that a new plan be tried. The worker would cordially agree, and the director would walk off. Five minutes later he would find the worker back at the old place, knitting his brows, pursing his lips, and sticking to the old error, which he knew to be an error.

This kind of stupidity victimizes all of us. Why do I continually misspell certain words, so that I have an actual vocabulary of spelling errors? Why do I make the same grammatical mistake in Latin again and again? Why can’t I see at once what it means to organize a piece of writing ? Why did Newton have to wait for inspiration till he saw the apple fall ? The answer is our inveterate tendency to get into ruts. So far removed is the essence of learning from becoming routinized that, when this happens to us, learning stops. To continue we have to jolt ourselves out of the rut, to try out alternatives, to overcome a limited and specific stupidity which, like a paralysis, can frustrate and render nugatory the will to learn. To put it otherwise, we are all strongly subject to mental cramp. When the great genius breaks with the past, and achieves a profoundly original and significant regrouping of experience, we exclaim: ‘Inspiration!’ We should do better to call it learning.

Then there is a more general stupidity, which is the failure to see how a principle or procedure perfectly well known applies in circumstances that are new and strange. A problem in algebra was given to 1200 people. Simple tests proved that 1000 or more of them knew every operation required to solve it, but only about 300 got the solution. Why? They could not apply what they knew. Is this unusual? Well, try this one on yourself. What are the factors of (x-y)? Do you say there are none? This was the answer of a group of graduate students to whom the test was given. But don’t you recall that (x2-y2) = (x+y) (x-y)? So did they. Then why did n’t they see that (x-y) = (x½+y½) (x½-y½)? Just stupidity — just a failure to see the point.

Then there is universal stupidity, universal limitation. It is said that a monkey cannot learn to unwrap a cord wound twice round a stick. The situation is too complex for him. For us it is simple and obvious. But you and I can never learn to solve at a glance the puzzle of a tangled fishline. Perhaps to a superhuman intelligence that would be as simple as the monkey’s problem seems to us.

A colored girl in the sixth grade was given the following problem: ‘Joseph rode on a merry-go-round twelve times. Each time cost him three cents. How much did he pay for all his rides?’ She utterly failed to solve it. Questioned as to her methods of work, she replied: ‘If there are lots of numbers, I adds. If there are only two numbers with lots of parts [digits], I subtracts. But if there are just two numbers and one littler than the other, it is hard; I divides if they come out even, but if they don’t, I multiply.’ You smile? Perhaps the high gods smile also when you yourself find something a little troublesome with differential equations or the theory of functions. Your wish to learn may vault as high as heaven. Your effective will to learn is limited by the complexity of the pattern your mind can grasp.

So critically important is the organized, directed will that its regular effect is to diminish, and sometimes greatly to diminish, the amount of effort needed to achieve a goal. Investigation has shown many times that students in school who do the best work also do the least studying. When a girl in college bitterly complains that her roommate works only for a day or two before exams and pulls A’s and B’s, while she studies till her eyes drop out and can only get C’s and D’s, she is having quite an ordinary experience. Though she may not know it, she is the victim of one of the common disabilities of human nature. Quality, not quantity, counts. Not the number of repetitions, but the intelligent will, is the crux of learning. In one university 348 students were divided into three groups of decreasing intelligence. The best group had an average mark of 86, and studied 23 hours in a normal week; the next best had a mark of 80, and studied 30 hours; the lowest group had a mark of 76, and studied 49 hours. Surely this reveals much concerning the conditions of human achievement.

IV

Learning is a fateful process. There is good reason to hold that, once a person has learned anything, he is permanently and irrevocably changed. We may doubt the dogma of the psychoanalysts that no impression is ever forgotten. It seems too sweeping; universal negatives are hard to prove. But all the facts seem to point away from what I might call the desert-sand theory of learning. This is the view that practice imprints certain traces, and that the moment it ceases the sand begins to drift in, till at last everything is utterly erased.

A certain psychologist memorized a number of selections of prose and verse. He banished them from his mind, and stowed the clippings away in a file for five years. When he turned his thoughts to them again, he could remember hardly a word. He had a friend read them to him, mixed in with many other selections, and he could not even tell which were the ones he had learned. This seems like almost utter loss. But then he undertook to learn them once again, and he found he could do so in about half the time it had taken him originally. Everything seemed gone, yet something very permanent remained.

Similar results have been obtained with physical skills. When Paderewski returns to the piano after many years, all the world wonders at the reconstitution of his technique. Wonderful, to be sure, yet a marvel familiar enough in the experimental psychology of learning. We often think that swimming and dancing belong to a small group of special skills, because we do not seem to lose them over long intervals without practice. As a matter of fact, this is the rule rather than the exception. The refinements of technique, to be sure, are not immediately there, — this is true also of swimming and dancing, — but the basic adjustment, the basic structure embedded in the personality, which is far more important than the refinements and nuances, remains at our service.

Even when we think at first that we have forgotten something, this may not be the case at all. In a certain experiment the subjects were asked to recite poems learned some time ago. Their efforts were very imperfect. Then they were urged to try hard, to do their best, to reconstruct what seemed lost, to take their time. And more and more was steadily recovered. This may, perhaps, seem rather commonplace, except in so far as an everyday experience is subjected to experimental verification. Yet to the reflective mind such salvagings from some strange limbo have an uncanny look. What is it that we lose? What is it that we keep? Why should the directed will be able to hook so many fish swimming in the psychic depths?

As a matter of fact, what we call forgetting is less an affair of sheer loss than of confusion. Details become mixed; fact and fancy intertwine with one another. The material is not ready on the instant, but apparently it is still there.

One of the most curious features of our mental life is the quantity of undocumented material we carry about with us. We know — or think we know — all sorts of things. Yet of how we came to know them we have not the vestige of an idea. If we were asked to give chapter and verse, we could not do it. A prosecuting attorney would have us very much at his mercy. Still we are perfectly confident, sure that we are right. The fact seems to be that we are capable of learning a great deal incidentally, by just ‘picking it up.’ An experiment was set up in which adult pupils learned a special and complex multiplication table. Some of them memorized the table first, and then did sums with it; others started with the sums, referred to the table for each operation, but never memorized it. These latter came to know and independently to use the table better and with less effort than the former. They had just ‘ picked it up.’ They would be quite sure, for instance, that 7X29 is 203, but exactly how they had acquired the knowledge they were unaware. A great many of our most valuable items of knowledge and skill are acquired in this way, without documentation or conscious reference — incidentally acquired, that is. The sources of the item are buried in oblivion; the structure of thought and action remains.

If the reader wishes to catch the true feel of the learning process, let him try the following simple and not unprofitable experiment. Let him take a poem of a hundred lines or more. Let him read it through once in the morning and once in the evening, day after day. At first nothing much in the way of learning seems to take place. One reads the poem, and forgets almost all of it. But suddenly there arrives a time when one becomes aware that one knows the poem, that one could start at the beginning and recite along to the end. Contrast this with the businesslike process of learning perfectly ten lines each day. How dutiful and practical it seems! Something attempted, something done, to earn a night’s repose. Yet if one pursues the ten-line method one will learn the poem more slowly and less well than by the procedure which seems utterly unbusinesslike, and which at first appears to yield no results at all. The point is that what we call learning a poem is not grinding it bit by bit into our tissues. Learning the poem means creating it as a living structure in our minds.

V

The considerations just adduced help us to understand the extraordinary subtlety of the learning process, and its pervasive influence upon human destiny. It is a good many years now since William James, in words of insinuating eloquence, implored teachers to build all learning upon native instinct. To-day the position we would take seems almost the inverse of his. For it appears that most of those impulsive tendencies which seem so much a part of us that we think they must be inborn are indeed the products of learning. Here is no school-bound process, but a force ramifying through all the affairs of life. We learn our hopes and fears, our ambitions and dreads, our loves and hates, our interests and distastes, and we do it so naturally that we are hardly more aware of what is happening to us than of the beating of our hearts.

Why does one man shine as an executive, another as a salesman, another as a soldier, another as a mathematician, another as a musician? The answer which leaps first to our minds is: Because they were born so. But such a view finds little in psychological investigation to substantiate it. Many a careful search has been made to isolate special innate abilities, but in the main such attempts have drawn blank. What usually emerges is not the difference in the abilities of mathematician, executive, musician, soldier, sailor, tinker, and tailor, but their extraordinary similarity. Great achievement in any field requires just about the same basic equipment. Almost we seem constrained to believe that there is no such thing as innate musical ability, or executive ability, or legal ability, or mathematical ability. Even the great genius seems to be, in the first instance, simply a high-grade human being, capable of developing in many directions, and not in one alone. He gains his special slant through learning, and the fact that he often acquires it very young may be accounted for by the subtle, pervasive, yet conquering power of a will to learn which is often aroused by influences that escape ordinary observation. Versatility, rather than specialization, is nature’s gift to man. Learning cashes the blank check of native versatility in the name of some special achievement; and it may come about so easily and so fast that we call the special achievement the handiwork of nature too.

Yet in a sense we should be right. The products of learning are themselves products of nature. They are not artifacts or tricks. We only think they are when we think of learning as an affair of schoolrooms, dull books, dry routines. When we see a Tilden on the court, a Jones on the green, a Menuhin with his violin, an Einstein solving a problem, an O’Neill writing a play, we are not beholding the artificial tricks of a very superior trained animal. Such virtuosity is a manifestation of human nature at the very topmost peak of realization. Everything works together, perfectly and without impediment. The whole personality is mobilized, integrated, expressing its essential nature in the triumphant act. In learning their skills these men learned to be natural, to be themselves in fullest measure.

Just as plants are shaped and tinted by the soil and climate, so are men moulded by the climate of ideas and expectations in which they live. The process of such shaping is what we call learning. And learning is the familiar miracle which creates out of the raw material of nature the finished product called humanity.