Psychologist Alison Gopnik, in MacLeans "In conversation: Alison Gopnik".
Q: What’s the traditional approach to learning at a university, and how does it square with what experts know about how people learn?
A: The traditional way of thinking about learning at a university is: there’s somebody who’s a teacher, who actually has some amount of knowledge, and their job is figuring out a way of communicating that knowledge. That’s literally a medieval model; it comes from the days when there weren’t a lot of printed books around, so someone read the book and explained it to everybody else. That’s our model for what university education, and for that matter high school education, ought to be like. It’s not a model that anybody’s ever found any independent evidence for.
See also my post, "A reason for practical genomic education".
