The link between Education and Learning
Nobel Laureate Esther Duflo on why the poor can’t learn
I am glad I watched the 55 minute press conference clip of Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, this years Nobel prize winners in Economics (along with Michael Kremer). When asked about her hopes for education in the third-world she espoused a powerful idea that cuts to the heart of the issue. Her response was so well articulated that I think it just opens up many deep questions about inequality, the utility of education and most importantly the act of “learning”.
In the context of why a lot of the educational programmes in the third world fail she said — , “you can’t expect children to learn if what they are taught is so far away from what they already know, that they have no means of connecting the dots, they then start to believe they are stupid”. I think this is really a classic problem of what prevents learning from occuring at different stages of the education cycle. The target of the teaching exercise is out of whack with the level of the learner.
Ofcourse this problem is particularly acute when you are trying to educate those who have never had the chance to experience formal education but I think this is a universal problem with the learning exercise.
Even in my own research when I read something that I cannot breakdown into preliminary concepts I already know, I have to suspend reading and go back to first picking up the foundational concepts. So atleast for me, what seems like a barrier to learning is not really a barrier, but a delay. Because I have the means of self-education, access to resources, access to the internet and an unlimited supply of information, with enough motivation I can conquer those learning barriers. I certainly couldn’t do that if I was a child below the age of 15 in a low income household in the third-world where the only avenue for learning is the local school. The entire intellectual exercise of learning begins and ends within the periphery of the school.
When I think about my own life, I don’t think I ever learnt anything during class, I almost always learnt in solitude, in what I call “post-processing”. If I did not have the means to post-process I would learn nothing. Most of the times, post-processing involves repetition, the need to re-read/practice concepts several times to solidify intuition.
Learning outcomes depend crucially and sometimes almost entirely not just on the quality of teaching but on the quality of access. I use the word “access” here in a really broad sense, access to sources of knowledge, a place to sit and read or write, a place that facilitates the act of thinking.
The problem with the poor is that they have none of that, hence they are able to do very little with the knowledge they accumulate. Not only does the knowledge seem completely indigestible, they don’t have a broader understanding of why this process of learning might improve their lives. Hence, they drop out of the process; discouraged, dejected and never to return seeking a completely alternative path.
This is not to say that the ambition to educate the world’s poor is irrational, in order for it to be effective the teaching has to be far more tailored to the level at which a child can learn. Learning is a slow and incremental process, and certainly not always easy to enjoy, but the point of educational programmes shouldn’t be to impart a certain fixed syllabus but to enable learning to occur. It ought to be measured as such.
