Schools and universities have usually been organized as if to suggest that all students learn at about the same rather plodding and regular speed. But, whenever the actual rates at which different people learn have been tested, nothing has been found to justify such an organization. Not only do individuals learn at vastly different speeds and in different ways, but man seems capable of astonishing feats of rapid learning when the attendant circumstances are favourable. It seems that, in customary educational settings, one habitually uses only a tiny fraction of one's learning capacities. Excerpt from the Encyclopaedia Britannica Complexities of Human Learning Human learning is complex rather than simple.
Learners are apt to learn more than one thing at a time.
Sometimes this process is conscious, as when one simultaneously or rapidly assimilates many specific items of a whole. Educators are therefore becoming increasingly concerned with these concomitant learnings. They are aware that the long-term significance of the arithmetical skill that the student consciously learns may be nugatory compared with the importance of what he learns about himself as a learner, about his capacities and limits, about his relationship with his teacher, about power and authority, about his relationships with his fellow students, about equality, collaboration, competition, and friendship. As educators become more knowledgeable about the importance of learning climates, they are impelled to abandon simplified techniques of teaching in favour of a more complex approach that views learning in the context of a matrix of relationships and forces that act upon the student, the teacher, the school, and the community. Course Materials I. Books and Model Sets.