Yes

by Gerard Coulombe

Created on: June 21, 2009   Last Updated: July 25, 2009

Learning skills are acquired mainly from books. There ought to be a distinction made from the start between skills and learning. Learning to read English, for example, involves the acquisition of skills related to reading English. Staying with "English" as key to learning in English, having learned to read English well permits any reader with the skills of expert reader in English with learning sets of skills to be found by a skilled reader in almost any book, manual, or print media, that instructs one in the learning of sets of skills that are available to a reader at different levels of comprehension. These sets of skills make it possible for some people to progress from the acquisition of a few basic skills to mastery of more complex skills.

Having reinforced the proposition that learning skills are acquired mainly from books, let us examine how one learns, per se. What follows is not a textbook version of how one learns skills by reading. As everyone is prepared to argue that we all learn how to do things by trial and error, it is also true that this is only possible up to a point. Many of us quit long before we solve a problem that we had thought, on first observation, quite easy to solve.

Thus our skills are learned by trial and error. We add to the time needed to solve a problem when we repeat unknowingly repeat an error simply because it seems obvious to us that a decision we made to do something one-way was natural. The fact may be that we needed to use an entirely different approach to a solution. While there are alternative solutions to a problem, there are degrees of efficiency in the solutions we come up with. That is why, when we decide to assemble a desk in a box, for example, we are left with extra pieces. Had we read the directions that come with the piece, we might have save some time even if these "directions" are not always as helpful as they purport to be because of someone at the other end having difficulty with the English language. We of course, by and large, do not read Chinese.

Well, reading "how to" directions that come with anything we need to assemble for it to acquire its functionality is one thing, but it's not the same as what is required to read a book. That is true, but books are germane to the complexity of the task or project and goal. Some necessary "how to" instruction is short. Some "how to" instruction is long. It's that simple.

Anyone who buys into the premise as explained above agrees with the thesis that learning skills are acquired mainly from books. Anyone who disagrees does not. The latter will argue that the distinction between learning skills and any other job, let us say, occupational skills, are independent from each other.

It may be that we are really talking about formal learning versus informal reading. Lincoln learned law by reading law books. He probably learned to be a lawyer by watching lawyers practicing law. The reader might see where this argument is going. The Great Impostor learned how to be a doctor in the Canadian Navy when he was at sea and had to perform an emergency appendectomy. He took a few minutes to read it in a book that he found in the surgical unit.

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