I guess that more people learn to ride a bike in childhood than as adults, but I believe that the usual method at any age is to get on it and ride it. There really isn’t much you can do to teach someone how to do it.
OK, so I suppose it doesn’t take much personal contact and trust to acquire a skill of the bike-riding type. In particular if you’re an autonomous enough learner, in particular if the skill is relatively basic.
The original assertion, though, was about personal contact and trust being required to transfer a skill of the bike-riding type, and perhaps one reason to make this assertion is that the usual method involves a parent dispensing encouragement and various other forms of help, vis-a-vis a child. (I learnt it from my grandfather, and have a lot of positive affect to accompany the memories.)
Providing an environment in which learning, an intrinsically risky activity, becomes safe and pleasurable—I know from experience that this takes rapport and trust, it doesn’t just happen. Such an environment is perhaps not a prerequisite to acquiring a non-verbalized skill, but it does help a lot; as such it makes it possible for people who would otherwise give up on learning before they made it to the first plateau.
We must have had very different experiences of many things. Tell me more about learning being risky. I have been learning Japanese drumming since the beginning of last year (in a class), and stochastic calculus in the last few months (from books), and “risky” is not a word it would occur to me to apply to either process. The only risk I can see in learning to ride a bicycle is the risk of crashing.
One major risk involved in learning is to your self-esteem: feeling ridiculous when you make a mistake, feeling frustrated when you can’t get an exercise right for hours of trying, and so on.
As you note, in physical aptitudes there is a non-trivial risk of injury.
There is the risk, too, of wasting a lot of time on something you’ll turn out not to be good at.
Perhaps these things seem “safe” to you, but that’s what makes you a learner, in contrast with large numbers of people who can’t be bothered to learn anything new once they’re out of school and in a job. They’d rather risk their skills becoming obsolete and ending up unemployable than risk learning: that’s how scary learning is to most people.
One major risk involved in learning is to your self-esteem: feeling ridiculous when you make a mistake, feeling frustrated when you can’t get an exercise right for hours of trying, and so on.
I would say that the problem then is with the individual, not with learning. Those feelings reset on false beliefs that no-one is born with. Those who acquire them learn them from unfortunate experiences. Others chance to have more fortunate experiences and learn different attitudes. And some manage in adulthood to expose their false beliefs to the light of day, clearly perceive their falsity, and stop believing them.
They’d rather risk their skills becoming obsolete and ending up unemployable than risk learning: that’s how scary learning is to most people.
I doubt people are consciously making this decision, but rather they aren’t calculating the potential rewards as opposed to potential risks well. A risk that is in the far future is often taken less seriously than a small risk now.
People who buy insurance are demonstrating ability to trade off small risks now against bigger risks in the future, but often the same people invest less in keeping their professional skills current than they do in insurance.
Personal experience tells me that I had (and still have) a bunch of Ugh fields related to learning, which suggest that there are actual negative consequences of engaging in the activity (per the theory of Ugh fields).
My hunch is that the perceived risks of learning accounts in a significant part for why people don’t invest in learning, compared to the low perceived reward of learning. I could well be wrong. How could we go about testing this hypothesis?
I believe that the usual method at any age is to get on it and ride it. There really isn’t much you can do to teach someone how to do it.
Are you serious? I could never have learned to ride a bike without my parents spending hours and hours trying to teach me. Did you also learn to swim by jumping into water and trying not to drown? I’d be very surprised if most people learned to ride a bike without instruction, but I may be unusual.
Did you also learn to swim by jumping into water and trying not to drown?
There was actually at some point a theory that “babies are born knowing how to swim”, and on one occasion at around age three, at a holiday resort the family was staying at, I was thrown into a swimming pool by a caretaker who subscribed to this theory.
It seems that after that episode nobody could get me to feel comfortable enough in water to get any good at swimming (in spite of summer vacations by the seaside for ten years straight, under the care of my grandad who taught me how to ride a bike). I only learned the basics of swimming, mostly by myself with verbal instruction from a few others, around age 30.
I could never have learned to ride a bike without my parents spending hours and hours trying to teach me.
Maybe there’s a cultural difference, but I don’t know what country you’re in (or were in). I’ve never heard of anyone learning to ride a bike except by riding it. But clearly we need some evidence. I don’t care for the bodge of using karma to conduct a poll, so I’ll just ask anyone reading this who can ride a bicycle to post a reply to this comment saying how they learned, and in what country. “Taught” should mean active instruction, something more than just someone being around to provide comfort for scrapes and to keep children out of traffic until they’re ready.
Results so far:
RichardKennaway: self-taught as adult, late 70′s, UK
Morendil: taught in childhood by grandfather, UK?
Blueberry: taught in childhood by parents, where?
So that’s two to one against my current view, but those replies may be biased: other self-taught people will not have had as strong a reason to post agreement.
I dont’t know how much this will support your position, but: mid 1980s, Texas, USA, by my father.
And as I said above, it did take a while to learn, but afterward, my reaction was, “Wait—all I have to do is keep in motion and I won’t fall over. Why didn’t he just say that all along?” That began my long history of encountering people who overestimate the difficulty of, or fail to simplify the process to teaching or justifying something.
ETA: Also, I haven’t ridden a bike in over 15 years, so that might be a good test of whether my “just keep in motion” heuristic allows me to preserve the knowledge.
Also, I haven’t ridden a bike in over 15 years, so that might be a good test of whether my “just keep in motion” heuristic allows me to preserve the knowledge.
The fact that ‘like riding a bike’ is a saying used to describe skills that you never forget suggests that it wouldn’t be a very good test.
Yeah, I wasn’t so sure it would be a good test. Still, I’m not sure how well the “you don’t forget how to learn a bike” hypothesis is tested, nor how much of its unforgettability is due to the simplicity of the key insights.
I don’t disagree, but there’s typically a barrier, increasing with time since last use, that must be overcome to re-access that kinesthetic knowledge. And think verbal heuristics like the one I gave can greatly shorten the time you need to complete this process.
early 90s, US. I also had training wheels for a while first, which didn’t actually teach me anything. I didn’t learn until they were removed. And I also had someone running along for reassurance.
Canada, mid 1960s. Brother tried to teach me but I mostly ignored him. Used bike with training wheels, which I raised higher and higher and removed completely after a couple of weeks.
United States, early 60s (I think it’s worth mentioning when because cultures change), just given a bike with training wheels, and I figured it out myself.
There’s some variation in method of instruction. My grandpa had fitted my bike with a long handle in the back and used that to help me balance after taking the training wheels off. With one of my kids I tried the method of gradually lifting the training wheels to make the balance more precarious over time. One of the other two just “got it”, as I remember, in one or two sessions. Otherwise it was the standard riding down a slight slope and advising them “keep your feet on the pedals”, and running alongside for reassurance.
The truth is, that’s how most skilled artists learned to draw. In the past, there was a more formalized teaching role, often starting at age eight, and you can go through school and even get through art school having been given so little knowledge, that if you know how to draw a human from imagination, you can confidently say you are an autodidact.
It’s not because art, (particularly representational figure drawing, from imagination or not) is inherently unteachable, but a lot of people tend to think so.
This is not the only skill like this, although I think it’s one that’s perhaps the least understood and where misinformation is the most tolerated.
I guess that more people learn to ride a bike in childhood than as adults, but I believe that the usual method at any age is to get on it and ride it. There really isn’t much you can do to teach someone how to do it.
OK, so I suppose it doesn’t take much personal contact and trust to acquire a skill of the bike-riding type. In particular if you’re an autonomous enough learner, in particular if the skill is relatively basic.
The original assertion, though, was about personal contact and trust being required to transfer a skill of the bike-riding type, and perhaps one reason to make this assertion is that the usual method involves a parent dispensing encouragement and various other forms of help, vis-a-vis a child. (I learnt it from my grandfather, and have a lot of positive affect to accompany the memories.)
Providing an environment in which learning, an intrinsically risky activity, becomes safe and pleasurable—I know from experience that this takes rapport and trust, it doesn’t just happen. Such an environment is perhaps not a prerequisite to acquiring a non-verbalized skill, but it does help a lot; as such it makes it possible for people who would otherwise give up on learning before they made it to the first plateau.
We must have had very different experiences of many things. Tell me more about learning being risky. I have been learning Japanese drumming since the beginning of last year (in a class), and stochastic calculus in the last few months (from books), and “risky” is not a word it would occur to me to apply to either process. The only risk I can see in learning to ride a bicycle is the risk of crashing.
One major risk involved in learning is to your self-esteem: feeling ridiculous when you make a mistake, feeling frustrated when you can’t get an exercise right for hours of trying, and so on.
As you note, in physical aptitudes there is a non-trivial risk of injury.
There is the risk, too, of wasting a lot of time on something you’ll turn out not to be good at.
Perhaps these things seem “safe” to you, but that’s what makes you a learner, in contrast with large numbers of people who can’t be bothered to learn anything new once they’re out of school and in a job. They’d rather risk their skills becoming obsolete and ending up unemployable than risk learning: that’s how scary learning is to most people.
I would say that the problem then is with the individual, not with learning. Those feelings reset on false beliefs that no-one is born with. Those who acquire them learn them from unfortunate experiences. Others chance to have more fortunate experiences and learn different attitudes. And some manage in adulthood to expose their false beliefs to the light of day, clearly perceive their falsity, and stop believing them.
Thus it is said, “The things that we learn prevent us from learning.”
I doubt people are consciously making this decision, but rather they aren’t calculating the potential rewards as opposed to potential risks well. A risk that is in the far future is often taken less seriously than a small risk now.
People who buy insurance are demonstrating ability to trade off small risks now against bigger risks in the future, but often the same people invest less in keeping their professional skills current than they do in insurance.
Personal experience tells me that I had (and still have) a bunch of Ugh fields related to learning, which suggest that there are actual negative consequences of engaging in the activity (per the theory of Ugh fields).
My hunch is that the perceived risks of learning accounts in a significant part for why people don’t invest in learning, compared to the low perceived reward of learning. I could well be wrong. How could we go about testing this hypothesis?
I’m not sure. It may require a more precise statement to make it testable.
Are you serious? I could never have learned to ride a bike without my parents spending hours and hours trying to teach me. Did you also learn to swim by jumping into water and trying not to drown? I’d be very surprised if most people learned to ride a bike without instruction, but I may be unusual.
There was actually at some point a theory that “babies are born knowing how to swim”, and on one occasion at around age three, at a holiday resort the family was staying at, I was thrown into a swimming pool by a caretaker who subscribed to this theory.
It seems that after that episode nobody could get me to feel comfortable enough in water to get any good at swimming (in spite of summer vacations by the seaside for ten years straight, under the care of my grandad who taught me how to ride a bike). I only learned the basics of swimming, mostly by myself with verbal instruction from a few others, around age 30.
I’m so sorry. That is truly horrific abuse.
Maybe there’s a cultural difference, but I don’t know what country you’re in (or were in). I’ve never heard of anyone learning to ride a bike except by riding it. But clearly we need some evidence. I don’t care for the bodge of using karma to conduct a poll, so I’ll just ask anyone reading this who can ride a bicycle to post a reply to this comment saying how they learned, and in what country. “Taught” should mean active instruction, something more than just someone being around to provide comfort for scrapes and to keep children out of traffic until they’re ready.
Results so far:
RichardKennaway: self-taught as adult, late 70′s, UK
Morendil: taught in childhood by grandfather, UK?
Blueberry: taught in childhood by parents, where?
So that’s two to one against my current view, but those replies may be biased: other self-taught people will not have had as strong a reason to post agreement.
I dont’t know how much this will support your position, but: mid 1980s, Texas, USA, by my father.
And as I said above, it did take a while to learn, but afterward, my reaction was, “Wait—all I have to do is keep in motion and I won’t fall over. Why didn’t he just say that all along?” That began my long history of encountering people who overestimate the difficulty of, or fail to simplify the process to teaching or justifying something.
ETA: Also, I haven’t ridden a bike in over 15 years, so that might be a good test of whether my “just keep in motion” heuristic allows me to preserve the knowledge.
The fact that ‘like riding a bike’ is a saying used to describe skills that you never forget suggests that it wouldn’t be a very good test.
Yeah, I wasn’t so sure it would be a good test. Still, I’m not sure how well the “you don’t forget how to learn a bike” hypothesis is tested, nor how much of its unforgettability is due to the simplicity of the key insights.
Most people don’t store the insights of bike riding verbally—the insights are stored kinesthetically. It seems to be much easier to forget math.
I don’t disagree, but there’s typically a barrier, increasing with time since last use, that must be overcome to re-access that kinesthetic knowledge. And think verbal heuristics like the one I gave can greatly shorten the time you need to complete this process.
early 90s, US. I also had training wheels for a while first, which didn’t actually teach me anything. I didn’t learn until they were removed. And I also had someone running along for reassurance.
Canada, mid 1960s. Brother tried to teach me but I mostly ignored him. Used bike with training wheels, which I raised higher and higher and removed completely after a couple of weeks.
United States, early 60s (I think it’s worth mentioning when because cultures change), just given a bike with training wheels, and I figured it out myself.
France, but close enough. ;)
There’s some variation in method of instruction. My grandpa had fitted my bike with a long handle in the back and used that to help me balance after taking the training wheels off. With one of my kids I tried the method of gradually lifting the training wheels to make the balance more precarious over time. One of the other two just “got it”, as I remember, in one or two sessions. Otherwise it was the standard riding down a slight slope and advising them “keep your feet on the pedals”, and running alongside for reassurance.
The truth is, that’s how most skilled artists learned to draw. In the past, there was a more formalized teaching role, often starting at age eight, and you can go through school and even get through art school having been given so little knowledge, that if you know how to draw a human from imagination, you can confidently say you are an autodidact.
It’s not because art, (particularly representational figure drawing, from imagination or not) is inherently unteachable, but a lot of people tend to think so.
This is not the only skill like this, although I think it’s one that’s perhaps the least understood and where misinformation is the most tolerated.