13. Learning And Training
Thus far, Munsterberg has considered methods for identifying the best possible worker for any given occupation - the success of which depends on the existence of capable workers. It would be a foolish hope of any employer to assume that the perfect worker exists and merely needs to be identified.
(EN: Also, if the foolish hope proves to be true and a perfect candidate exists, there is the even more foolish hope that he would be willing to accept an offer - that a highly capable worker would be unemployed or so poorly treated by his current employer that he might consider leaving his current place.)
To begin, it should be accepted that every form of labor must first be learned. No man is born a blacksmith or an accountant, but must at some point be taught his trade. It also stands to reason that while men are born with more or less the same capacities, some excel, and it is likely that the manner in which they are taught or trained has much to do with their excellence, and likely more than their natural proclivities.
If this be true, then it can be taken a step further: some teachers are better than others at training men - and that the teacher, too, is a person who has learned his profession. In essence, it is the method of teaching that has made some teachers more effective than others, and the method of training that has made some workers more effective than others.
The firm that hires workers and puts them to task without any training is thereby gambling on the quality of education those workers have received in the past, and the degree to which their skills have been developed, and developed in a manner that is applicable to the precise nature of the work.
There is very little consideration of methodology in teaching: anyone who is able to calculate feels himself able to teach arithmetic to another person who cannot. But to be able to do something exercises different skills than being able to teach it. This can readily be seen in apprenticeship: if an apprentice merely mimics the motions of his master without understanding, he is at best capable of performing the same tasks, under the same circumstances, with the same outcome. A master who patiently teaches his apprentice the reasons for his actions imparts knowledge that can be adapted to other circumstances, and applied to similar tasks in similar situations.
Pedagogy, the study of the methods of teaching, has only received attention in the past decade or so - and it has already been found that many of the traditional methods of teaching are a waste of time and energy that profit the student nothing. A specific example is in the area of phonics - teaching students the sound of a letter is much more efficient than teaching them the names of the letters. The letter "H" is never pronounced as "aitch" and learning this does not enable a student to read.
Or consider the way in which a page of text may be memorized: to proceed word by word, to read whole sentences at a time, or to read the whole page top to bottom, or bottom to top and backward for that matter. One of these methods is more effective. Unfortunately, modern pedagogy often seeks to identify the method that is most comfortable for the teacher or the student, rather than a more arduous but effective alternative.
Teaching, like any profession, is often left for the teacher to decide, going on gut feel and what he considers to be common sense. And like any profession, teaching is filled with misfits and incompetents who are no good at their jobs - and who fail to produce educated students, or in some cases even succeed in producing incompetent ones. If any profession has in it the capacity to do great good or great harm to all of society, it is the profession of educator.
The simplest aspect of learning focuses on the repetition of movement. Studies by Fechner demonstrated the way in which the subject naturally adapts to repetitive motion, unconsciously finding more efficient ways to apply muscles to the task of motion over time. As such, a worker whose job consists of repetitive motions (such as a miner who constantly swings a pick) becomes more nimble, adept, and efficient over time and without practical instruction.
It has also been reasoned that the same principle applies to mental capacities, such as the experienced telegraph operator's facility for deciphering Morse code at high speed or the weaver's ability to recognize very subtle variations in the color of yarn at a glance.
The learning curve for such talents can be measured, but the precise causes have not been adequately investigated, as there are a myriad of functions involved in a task such as receiving a telegram, though it's generally suspected that it has to do with "telegraphic units" - whether the operator must recognize each letter, each word, or entire sentences by a series of dots and dashes, much in the way that a person learns to read text.
He mentions the typewriter as a combination of the two - the dexterity of the hands that strike the keys develop efficient motions, and of the mind that translates entire words, rather than individual letters, into a cognitive unit.
This considered, there is the question of the degree to which training can improve performance, and how much must naturally develop with practice over time - and the need to recognize that skills of the second order cannot be taught but must be given time to evolve. But the problem in this instance is that not all workers evolve, and quite a lot of time and work is wasted while hoping that they will eventually develop.
The author mentions an odd personal experiment he conducted in which he moved his watch from his left vest pocket, then later to the pockets of his trousers, to his right to see how long it would take for the motion to retrieve his watch became automatic. Even after he seemed to have completely automated the new motions after making a change, his hand still went to the customary pocket. He likens this to the problem of correcting the physical and mental processes of a person who has been trained to do something the wrong way, which is a particular problem.
Similar experiments at Columbia University have repeated this experiment in a more formal setting, and came to the same conclusion: that once a person learns one way to do things, he can over time acclimate himself to a change in the procedures, but still remains inclined to the original method even after a long period of time, though to a lesser degree.