I don’t think we should be dogmatic about not teaching, and I should probably edit my post to make that more clear. Ensuring efficient reproduction of knowledge through society is a hard problem—so we shouldn’t limit our tool box. That said, I do understand why a culture would look down upon teaching. It is a delicate craft and it often goes wrong. Especially if the teaching is initiated by the teacher it easily becomes a bit condecending / limiting the freedom of the learner. And nothing can kill you curiosity like an unasked for, or unnecessarily long, lecture.
But yeah, I think what one should aim for is having learning centered on real productive environments, but then of course one can augment that by pointing people to YouTube lectures, or sitting down to show them things, or problem sets, or whatever, as long as that is motivated by a real need right now in the project, not some abstract future utility. And so for coding, one would proably need some onboarding in the form of how to videos and maybe some Codecademy-style learning for the basics.
About the proximal zone of development: yes, that is a hard problem. I assume the easiest way to increase immersive learning is by first doing it for people who are already fairly skilled, so the gap is small. And then gradually you can build more complex structures that allows you to bridge larger gaps. Getting to where a three-year-old can play her way into cancer research is probably pretty far off, at least if they don’t have cancer researchers in the family.
One part of the solution for how to grow the distance between the master and the novice and still stay in the proximal zone of development is to use a layered approach. This is what most apprenticeship models do, at least in a non-European context: you have a lot of novices at different levels of skill, and they imitate each other in a chain all the way up to the master (and of course its not strictly hierarical but a mess of people observing and imitating across different distances of skill; there are also usually several masters, not the typical master-apprenticeship relationship we see in the more regulated markets of medieval Europe).
I think your idea of having masters explain what they do has merit. It is a super useful tool in some circumstances. But if we want to scale access to more people, I think one should not impose too many such demands on masters. It is cognitively taxing and harms productivity.
I don’t think we should be dogmatic about not teaching, and I should probably edit my post to make that more clear. Ensuring efficient reproduction of knowledge through society is a hard problem—so we shouldn’t limit our tool box. That said, I do understand why a culture would look down upon teaching. It is a delicate craft and it often goes wrong. Especially if the teaching is initiated by the teacher it easily becomes a bit condecending / limiting the freedom of the learner. And nothing can kill you curiosity like an unasked for, or unnecessarily long, lecture.
But yeah, I think what one should aim for is having learning centered on real productive environments, but then of course one can augment that by pointing people to YouTube lectures, or sitting down to show them things, or problem sets, or whatever, as long as that is motivated by a real need right now in the project, not some abstract future utility. And so for coding, one would proably need some onboarding in the form of how to videos and maybe some Codecademy-style learning for the basics.
About the proximal zone of development: yes, that is a hard problem. I assume the easiest way to increase immersive learning is by first doing it for people who are already fairly skilled, so the gap is small. And then gradually you can build more complex structures that allows you to bridge larger gaps. Getting to where a three-year-old can play her way into cancer research is probably pretty far off, at least if they don’t have cancer researchers in the family.
One part of the solution for how to grow the distance between the master and the novice and still stay in the proximal zone of development is to use a layered approach. This is what most apprenticeship models do, at least in a non-European context: you have a lot of novices at different levels of skill, and they imitate each other in a chain all the way up to the master (and of course its not strictly hierarical but a mess of people observing and imitating across different distances of skill; there are also usually several masters, not the typical master-apprenticeship relationship we see in the more regulated markets of medieval Europe).
I think your idea of having masters explain what they do has merit. It is a super useful tool in some circumstances. But if we want to scale access to more people, I think one should not impose too many such demands on masters. It is cognitively taxing and harms productivity.