Experiential vs Didactic learning and finding effective balance in Education

Off the back of my last post "Traditional education and our warped view of Creativity within Science, I wanted to fill some gaps in my knowledge and take things a little further.

I touched on traditional education, experiential learning and the Liberal Arts. Since then, I've wondered more about why we don't see more experiential learning, and what alternative we've been subjected to.

It turns out that the alternative can likely be coined as "Didactic learning."

The Wikipedia page isn't bad and there's a few papers out there on didactics; but really what I'm wondering is what benefits didactic and experiential learning have and how we might approach finding a healthy balance in our learning environments - of course, the answer is not black and white

Photo by Joanna Kosinka on Unsplash

How were you taught in your schooling?

There's a good chance most of our teaching was done through sitting, listening, reading and writing, with the teacher being the centre of attention. This style of teaching is didactic, where an authoritative teacher has knowledge which is to be passed on to students.

An alternative to this is what I touched on in my last education post, experiential learning. In which the student is the centre of attention and knowledge is gained through experience.

The latter allows for knowledge to come about naturally to the student.

Maria Montessori was a huge advocate for this kind of open learning. By providing a particular environment, she would facilitate the child's learning in a way that is natural to the child. She first tried this with students that were failures, with the intent to have the succeed in traditional testing.

What showed was that traditional schooling structure as we know today, which fails on a lot of students, could be improved upon with a more open structure.

Montessori wouldn't restrict the children by setting certain times for certain activities, she would instead allow more freedom of choice. Meaning children could simply be as they were. And when you are as you are and become comfortable with that, you learn to create, act and learn in spite of what you're feeling.

Despite the open structure in Montessori's environment, you would also find a range of different didactic materials. Which are materials that can be used to teach or learn from. Source

Image by Soraya Irving on Unsplash

To help with definitions. Didactic teaching is where knowledge is transferred from teacher to student, and a didactic material is an object which holds knowledge. There's a whole market place for didactic materials called the Montessori Outlet.

So generally what you saw in Montessori's environment is the opportunity to learn through the experience of playing with didactic materials.

So in comparing the two: didactic learning is allow about obtaining the knowledge from a source and experiential learning is about gaining the knowledge through the experience.

In current society, where would a healthy balance be in education?

Well, I think we can all agree that we need more art in the world. Since experiential learning encourages more of a creative experience, I'm definitely on the side of experiential learning and teaching. But experiences which lack didactic materials might not be beneficial to someone who holds no knowledge.

Since young children have not gained a lot of knowledge, we might expect more didacticism and as we age, you might see a shift towards more social collaboration with a focus on the surrounding world - through experiences.

But a surprising contrast to this is Yogic Guru Sadhguru's approach to his daughter. He asks his friends and family to teach his daughter nothing. He says that children will learn on their own, by observing what they observel and Sadhguru is in favour of facilitating them only when approached.

By age 3, his daughter could speak 3 languages fluently. Source

As backing to Sadhguru's approach, what I read in the book, "The Rise of Superman" which went into the psychology of ultimate human performance - was that the best way to create talent within a child is to encourage behaviour associated with talent and don't give attention to anything else.

It's an interesting point to consider. What would happen if we left children and people to learn freely in environments which facilitated them.

Without restrictions, rules, shoulds and shouldn'ts - what would happen?

I don't know, I'm not a traditional teacher. I've taught the basics of music theory and educated people on core understanding of Blockchain technology and Cryptocurrency as well as other technology - and what I've found to be most effective is facilitating the learning that comes from their own curiosity.

And this would be my answer: Encourage and embrace curiosities and allow learning to occur in unique ways - just help where you can, don't underestimate people when they have self belief.

What do you think?

How do you think education should change?
Would others benefit more from a more free-learning environment?
Do we need to do any more than facilitate curiosity?

Thank you for reading! I appreciate you. If any of this connected with you please reach out in the comments. I've just had my first piece published on Medium and I'm excited to write about Blockchain and decentralisation, but if you'd like to see me write about a certain topic, let me know!

I'd love to hear from you, see you around!