Another common and mistaken idea hidden in the word "learning" is that learning and doing are different kinds of acts. Thus, not many years ago I began to play the cello. I love the instrument, spend many hours a day playing it, work hard at it, and mean someday to play it well. Most people would say that what I am doing is "learning to play the cello." Our language gives us no other words to say it. But these words carry into our minds the strange idea that there exists two very different processes: 1) learning to play the cello; and 2) playing the cello. They imply that I will do the first until I have completed it, at which point I will stop the first process and begin the second; in short, that I will go on "learning to play" until I "have learned to play," and that then I will begin "to play."
Of course, this is nonsense. There are not two processes, but one. We learn something by doing it. There is no other way. When we first do something, we probably will not do it very well. But if we keep on doing it, have good models to follow and helpful advice if and when we feel we need it, and always do it as well as we can, we will do it better. In time, we may do it very well.
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Educators talk all the time about "skills": reading skills, writing skills, communication skills, even listening skills. It may be true, at the level of words, to say that anyone doing a difficult thing well is using a variety of skills. But this does not mean the best way to teach a different act is to break it into as many separate skills as possible and teach them one by one. As Whitehead said years ago, we cannot separate an act from the skills involved in the act. The baby does not learn to speak by learning the skills of speech and then using them to learn to speak with or to walk by learning the skills of walking and then using them to walk with. He learns to speak by speaking, to walk by walking. When he takes his first hesitant step she is not practicing. He is not getting ready. He is not learning how to walk so that later he may walk somewhere.
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Here we see some of what the true teacher, the master, does for the student. He breaks down the large task so that whatever he may ask the student to do, the student, with effort, will be able to do, and from doing it will get greater powers, with which to do the next task. He gives a model, shows what is to be done. He may say something that will make it easier for the student to know and do what needs to be done. He gives feedback, makes the student see and feel what in fact he did. He makes a correction, shows the student the difference between what he did and what he was supposed to do, and shows how to close that difference. Most important, by doing this, he tries to give the student (or help him make for himself) standards, criteria, a heightened awareness, a model in his own mind/body, from which he will in time get his own instructions, feedback, and correction. Thus, as he sharpens the student's movements, he sharpens the criteria by which the student will later judge and correct his own movements. The true master does not want to make the student into a slave or puppet, but into a new master. He is not a behavior modifier. He does not move the student by imperceptible steps toward an end which only he, the master, can see. He seeks instead to give the student greater control of his own behavior, so that he may move imself toward his own ends...
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Before we can do the task in reality, we must be able to do it in our mind. I don't mean, just think "I can do it." I mean, get a picture, a total body feeling of what it would be like to do it. If we can't see and feel ourselves doing it, we wont be able to do it.
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The teacher's work, therefore, begins when that other person asks a question. No question, no teaching. But it is important to understand what a teacher can do and does with his answers, and what he cannot do. He does not give knowledge. Knowledge cannot be *given*. If you ask me a question all I can do in my reply is try and put into words a part of my experience. *To make meaning* out of my words, you must use your own experience. If you have not seen or done at least some part of what I have seen and done, then you cannot make any meaning from my words.
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Instead of Education , John Holt, 1976
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