History of the science of learning

I stumbled upon Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa's Brief History of the Science of Learning the other day and I've started reading through it. If you're expecting a bullet-pointed list, think again! Tokuhama-Espinosa provides a detailed exposition, with illustrations, of the key people, events, and research in the history of this discipline. And it's an incredibly engaging piece of work - in fact, a MUST for all learning professionals. 

In this post I review Part 1 of the paper.

"Some questions have faced teachers for centuries. What is important to know? Who is prepared to teach? Who should be taught and how? Hints at answers to these questions can be found throughout history, and these answers point repeatedly to key concepts that are the cornerstones of the new science of teaching and learning."

Right from the get-go, the brief history provides an utterly fascinating journey through the science of learning, starting with Egypt. Already I learn a very interesting fact: the earliest library we was built by Ashurbanipal, the king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (685–627 B.C.E.) in Babylonia. Fascinated by this, I wander off to Wikipedia to read that most Babylonian towns had libraries (and they also made leaps in medicine introducing the concepts of diagnosis, prognosis, physical examination, and prescriptions.)

Confucius gets a mention, and I discover was one of the first to propound differentiated instruction: “Teach according to the student's ability”. In 550 BC Confucius was making this important and yet we still don't practice this in education to any large extent. Hippocrates, Socrates, the Islamic Renaissance, Vesalius’s anatomical drawings, and Descartes are all referenced in the run up to Tokuham-Espinosa's discussion of the spread of formal education in the 18th and 19th centuries. Localization - that is, seeking associations between certain parts of the brain and brain functions - began, according to the history, in 1700–1800s. This was a time of discovery. Oh and error perhaps: phrenology was all the rage! But we learn by our mistakes and it did build the foundations for what we know today.

The nature-nurture debate is ongoing in education, psychology and an array of disciplines (are you who you are because of your genes, or how you were brought up, or both) and has its roots in late 1800s with Francis Galton, the father of eugenics. Tokuhama-Espinosa notes that the start of the 1900s heralded a rush to link behavior to biology at every opportunity - for example, in developmental psychology (this also explains the largely biomedical focus of psychiatry).


Getting closer to brain science as we know it, the implications of the Hebbian synapse rule (1949): Neurons that fire together, wire together is outlined with clarity and Piaget's profound contributions are discussed at length. The beauty of Piaget’s work, she points out, is that we now know that all of the processes developed by the child relate to different mental tasks that can be specifically localized in the brain. But we've yet to establish, I might add, what this correlation exactly means.

Lev Vygotsky's cultural mediation and internalization (“inner voice”) and his disciple, Alexander Luria's breakthroughs in “cultural–historical psychology” and its influences on thought are woven into the story with skill. These provide absorbing exposition on the influences from psychology and education, which would be complimented by advances in neuroscience at the same time in history.

Next up are Mark R. Rosenzweig's rat studies, which showed the effects of enriched environments on the brain. The debate about enrichment, as we know, continues today with parents encouraged to provide stimulating environments for their children. The science has yet to solidify, however. Again, patterns are detected, but how these translate are not always obvious until later, if ever.

Tokuhama-Espinosa goes on to point out that a number of academic researchers began explicitly linking brain functioning to learning and education starting in the 1970s. Amygdalar neuroimaging studies, which turn up every day on science research sites, made their first appearance at the same time. This period was when neuroscience began to flourish with various pioneering neuroscience societies springing up.

That's Part 1 so dig in. Part 2 to follow :-)