Advancement of Learning: 5 key phases

How we improve the way we learn is vital to every aspect of life. If we accept everything without question, ignorance and mistakes will never be removed. If we reject ideas arbitrarily, we are just as likely to be mired in confusion and errors. For thousands of years, it was down to the ad hoc discovery or invention of the odd individuals, in those rare moments that such new thinking was not crushed by prevailing conventions or thoughtless leaders, that human knowledge was enhanced.

However, a momentous turning point in history came in 1605 when Francis Bacon published The Advancement of Learning, which put forward a new systematic approach to guide how we learn. It has three notable components: 

·      Learning should be supported as a cooperative and objective enterprise. Everyone with relevant ideas and evidence should be allowed to contribute without undue interference from others.

·      Claims, ideas, beliefs etc should be subject to appropriate testing with the help of accumulating evidence, experiments, and scrutiny; and what is provisionally acceptable is revisable if warranted by further findings. 

·      The quest for better understanding requires constant vigilance in the detection and exposure of fallacies, prejudices, deception, and dogmas. No claim can be asserted as immune from critical appraisal.

Through the 17^th century, the influence of these Baconian ideas grew in relation to natural philosophy (what would come to be called the physical sciences), cumulating in the establishment of the Royal Society, whose members such as Boyle, Hooke, and Newton, demonstrated how we could get to learn more about the world through open, empirical research rather than relying on ‘sacred’ texts or ancient sages.

In the second phase in the 18^th century, thinkers across Europe extended the approach to virtually every issue worthy of study – history, the laws, religion, morals, customs, society, economics, art, government – nurturing the Enlightenment ethos of learning by critical questioning, cooperative research, evidence seeking, and the presentation of new ideas not as eternal truths, but as the latest findings to guide us until/unless a more robust alternative is discovered (an approach encapsulated in the notion of a ‘fair trial’ with its emphasis on evidence, coherence and room for appeal).

In the third phase in the 19^th century, utilitarian-minded reformists began to examine the institutional arrangements for carrying out this approach to learning. In all areas where questions could be raised about the acceptability of a given claim, belief or judgement, how an institution was structured and operated could determine if those questions were dealt with in the experimental cooperative manner. This drove reforms that steered institutions – law courts, universities, the legislature, public health bodies, businesses, etc. – to check for unsubstantiated assumptions and adopt procedures to facilitate the assessment of what should or should not be accepted as correct in their respective work.

In the fourth phase, which came in the first half of the 20^th century, there was recognition that institutional reforms themselves were limited by wider societal factors such as public policies, power inequalities, and resource availability, and government action was needed to overcome a range of barriers and threats to cooperative learning. Progressive governments discovered how important it was to safeguard learning in the face of economic turmoil, the rise of fascist and communist oppression, the outbreaks of wars – by developing stronger democratic systems to protect their citizens and enable them to decide how to improve their wellbeing.

By late 20^th century, we entered the fifth phase with the growing realisation that forces inimical to cooperation were gathering strength to overturn the approach of cooperative learning. These enemies of learning used a mix of tactics – attacks on scientific expertise, defence of traditional dogmas, celebration of prejudices, spreading of lies and misinformation, promoting irrational claims, undermining learning as ‘elitist’ – to dupe people into rejecting evidence-based findings and embracing instead the deceitful agenda they offer. They were challenged by communitarians, civic republicans, and deliberative democrats, who made their case for more effective communication and education to raise our understanding and utilisation of cooperative learning. However, by early 21^stcentury, efforts to sustain the advancement of learning are becoming overshadowed by the rallying of right-wing ‘populists’ in weaponising fallacies and lies. 

Will there be a sixth phase when the culture of cooperative learning triumphs over the champions of deception?  Or are we slipping down the insidious slope that returns us to the dark ages of dogmas and ignorance?  It is down to us to take a stand.