Fundamental foundations for learning

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At some point in our evolution as a species, human beings began to perceive that contexts and interactions were offering us a formative experience in our daily and labourious task to survive;

this experience accumulated and over time became a valuable source of information potentially capable of being transmitted to others in the form of knowledge. For knowledge to emerge and the ability to transmit it, it was necessary for our psychic disposition to be flooded with a temporal vision of space. Thus, under the notion of past and future, a present reality was being configured whose knowledge was necessary to explain and transmit. What other human beings said and did in certain contexts and experiences of the present could be systematised to be modified in the future, in its physical elements and in the same behaviour of other individuals

The learning of the accumulated experience, supposed the existence of a person who faced a changing environment with the experience of others who had already gone through that reality and had inherited this skill represented in the synthesis of everything that had been lived, and therefore learned up to that point. The life experiences of the oldest ones began to be decisive to face the new situations of the youngest and inexperienced. It will then be that uncertain expectation, that overwhelming uncertainty about the future, the first and main object of the reason of knowledge and its transmission and learning mechanisms, becoming the backbone of the meaning and foundation of knowledge and learning of 50 thousand years of human history to the present.

Over time, and the sophistication that was produced as knowledge became more complex (that is, as language produced culture, civilisations, laws, technologies, and social systems), so did learning theory. 100 years ago it was said that knowledge came with blood, and it was a frequent practice to punish or treat students harshly in the classroom. Winston Churchill tells in his memoirs that there was not a week where a teacher did not attack him in front of all the students at the Headmaster’s House of Harrow School. He attended his initial years here; until his father withdrew him outraged by the excessive beatings, he received in public to exemplify to other students the importance of discipline in learning. Today, we know that desirability can also influence learning and talent is not driven by blows and cohesiveness.

People tend to spend more time thinking about the things that matter to them. The more attention we pay to the topics that attract us, the more knowledge and skill about their management and forecasting will be enriched. We tend to avoid ideas and things that we don’t like. The more pleasant our learning concepts are (to think or work), the more time we will dedicate to them and the more passion we will impress on the paths travelled.

Another substantive change in the history of learning in the last 100 years has been that teachers and training facilitators are also understood as students; which implies, precisely, that their position as facilitator is the only difference from students. For this reason, more a student meets with a trainer, the more they can come to respect and admire that person if the later manages to empathise with their psychic dimensions. And this feeling can lead students to engage on a deeper level with the learning materials; which is fundamental when facing the wave of transformation that technology and distance education are assuming today.

Article Author

Hernan Poblete Research Director MORE

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