It is my understanding that prior to any institutional education, vocational experience was the only education most people would have. Soap makers, printers, masons, carpenters must have required apprenticeships, I know Benjamin Franklin had an apprenticeship as a printer (Franklin, 1791). Being an apprentice was the pathway to a job. Learning the trade from a more experienced individual. Today, apprenticeships are a still part of some career paths. For example, people who work on powerlines require apprenticeships — my partner’s father was a lineman for over 20 years, he had many apprentices. Internships, a similar but different endeavor, is a part of many careers in STEM. Even educational experiences which do not lead towards a job often occur with a more experienced person. In most cultures, elders are respected, holding wisdom, and giving advice to the youth. Throughout time, education has relied on educators. I cannot think of education without educators, nor do I want them separated.
Rarely is human behavior a coincidence, rather we either do or do not have the tools to explain such behavior. Fortunately, there exists empirical data that experts think differently than novices. For example, in the National Research Council’s consensus document on How People Learn, they reported on studies which compared the difference in ability between experts and novices. In one study, expert and novice chess players were asked to reconstruct a chess board from memory after seeing a short glimpse of a chess board in a specific configuration. The configuration was from a random point in a game, it was not completely random. Experts where much better at reconstructing the chess board, putting more chess pieces in the correct positions, when compared to the novices. Surprisingly, if the chess board was randomly configured, so the pieces were scattered on the board in a fashion unlikely to be seen in a real game, experts’, and novices’ abilities to reconstruct the chess board from memory became much closer (NRC, 2000). “Experts have acquired extensive knowledge that affects what they noticed and how they organize, represent, and interpret information in their environment” (NRC, 2000). In other words, their knowledge is organized in productive ways, given the stimuli they have seen and their intended use for such knowledge. This provides the impetus to structure educational experiences so that students can develop more expert knowledge. Thus, three-dimensional learning is born (NRC, 2012).
Some voices in education research argue for departure from the expert novice paradigm, incorporating student knowledge and their emerging understanding as a central piece in the educational experiences. I see value in this, both from a learning perspective, as I assume learning is better when this happens, and from a science perspective, as I assume engaging in epistemic activities with a degree of uncertainty better represents the scientific enterprise. However, I do not know how much we should move away from this paradigm.
References
Franklin, B. (1791). The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
National Research Council. (2000). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. National Academies Press.
National Research Council. (2012). A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. The National Academies Press.