True education is self education. I remember bits of a quote that said “school… yes I went to school but it got in the way of my real education.” How sad is that? How many students all over the world go through twelve to 16 years of schooling and have the same thoughts. I was fortunate that during my high school and college careers I can only say that was true half of the time. I believe that is still too much. “Mentors and teachers can guide us and colleagues can share what works for them, and teachers can tell us what to do, what works, and what the correct answer is but ultimately we walk the path of self discovery, true awareness, insight, and deep understanding alone.” (Brown and Moffett, 1999).
Socrates was one of the greatest educators who taught by asking questions and thus drawing out (as ‘ex duco’, meaning to ‘lead out’, which is the root of ‘education’) answers from his pupils. The overall purpose of questioning is to challenge accuracy and completeness of thinking in a way that acts to move people towards their ultimate goal not yours.
What is Learning? – Building Schema or “Neural Cliques”
According to Leslie A. Heart, and her work, Human Brain and Human Learning, “the human brain is constantly seeking patterns in its environment. The six patterns the brain identifies are objects, actions, procedures, situations, relationships and systems. The brain does not take in patterns in logical, sequential manner, it takes them in randomly”. In order for the brain to identify patterns and to make connections, the brain needs many, many real world experiences which are rich, varied, and challenging.
Equally important, when we learn we do not learn by making connections of individual isolated facts. We learn and remember when the brain is able to make physiological connections between millions and millions of neurons in the brain called neural pools, schema, or neural populations based on numerous experiences. Joe Z. Tsien, The Memory Code – Scientific America, July 2007, determined that “Neural Cliques are a group of neurons that respond to similarly to a selected event and thus operate collectively as a robust coding unit. The brain is not simply a device that records every detail of a particular event. Instead neural cliques in the memory system allow the brain to encode the key features of specific episodes and, at the same time, to extract from those experiences general information that can be APPLIED to a future situation that may share some essential features but vary in physical detail. This ability to generate abstract concepts and knowledge from daily episodes is the essence of our intelligence and enables us to solve new problems in the ever changing world.” Leslie Hart, says that “pattern recognition is the ability to identify and understand the things in our environment. The brain needs quantum amounts of experiences to understand and apply the patterns. Application of patterns are how mental programs (neural cliques) are built and mental programs allow humans to understand the patterns identified”. By using more rich, varied, and challenging learning experiences more curriculum connections and mastery will result from the formation of these more elaborate mental programs. “All of our experiences result in the formation of neuronal circuits. The richer, more varied, and more challenging the experiences, the more elaborate the neuronal circuits.” (Dr. Richard Restak, The New Brain.)
Neural Clique (Elaborate Connection of Various Experiences)
Building A Biomdical Science Program 