The Learning Triad

Learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires at least one kind of relationship—a bringing together of separate things so that those things can affect and change each other. A hot stove needs a hand to touch it. A book left unread on a shelf can’t impart knowledge to anyone. A student alone with her thoughts may deepen her thinking, but only about things she already knows. A teacher ignored is a teacher who has no effect.

In any kind of learning relationship, the student, the teacher, and the content all matter. They matter individually, but how they interact with each other matters more.

We can define each of these things broadly. A student can be anyone. I’m a grown man, but when I’m reading a big book like The Dawn of Everything, I am a student—I am learning new things directly from the content that has been written for me.

“Content” can be almost anything. I can learn new facts and ideas from a movie, or a YouTube video, or a forest, or a museum exhibit.

A teacher can be almost anyone: your parent, an athletic coach, a theater director, an older cousin who knows everything about Orcs. Most of us have some special skills or knowledge that we could teach others.

Not all of those things are necessary for learning to occur, especially as one grows older—but a student of any age must come into contact with something or someone in order to learn something new.

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Let’s talk about those relationships.

The direct relationship between a student and some piece of content is at the core of learning—certainly self-directed and life-long learning, but even school-based learning. I am changed and enlarged by my engagement with books, music, art, films, primary-source documents from history, and the critical and analytical work of those who have written appreciations and interpretations of art, literature, and history.

I don’t necessarily need a teacher or guide if the content is engaging and effective. If the content is lifeless and dull, of course, I won’t engage with it and I won’t learn anything from it. If the content is exciting but stripped of detail and complexity in order to hold onto my allegedly short, 21st-century attention-span, I may learn very little from it. The relationship between the learner and the content is tricky. There’s a Goldilocks effect at play: it has to invite me in and not drive me away, but it also has to demand something of me, to make me stretch and grow.

Left alone in the library or curled up on a comfy sofa all by myself, it’s just me and the words or images I’m learning from. What I make of the content and how I feel about it are entirely up to me—and, as an adult, it’s possible that no one will ever ask me or quiz me on what I think or know.

That unmediated relationship between learner and content requires a great deal of trust when children are involved, because children left alone with content could easily be taking in lies, propaganda, or all kinds of harmless or evil bullshit. No one is watching or listening. Adults may not even be aware of what the content contains. That’s why there is so much angst and furor around book assignment or book banning in schools (or what kids hear and see on TikTok). Who is watching what our children put into their minds—in school, at home, or online?

We expect adults to enter into relationships with content skeptically, warily, guarded by the shield of critical thinking. We expect adults to ask questions, assess reliability, and check sources. We do a lousy job of it, mostly. But for good or ill, most of the time, we leave each other alone to figure things out. Children are more vulnerable. Children have less context to bring to bear on new content. They have to be taught.

That is why we expect teachers to be involved and to have a direct and informed relationship with the content they’re using to teach their students. They are the guardians and the gatekeepers. They are in loco parentis. And, more than that, they are specialists in their field, trained to know what’s true and false, what’s useful and foolish, and how knowledge is scaffolded and built over time. If we in the community have questions about the appropriateness of some piece of content, teachers should be able to provide an answer. We need to be able trust their expertise and their ethics.

Teachers don’t just select materials; they also edit, rearrange, order, and structure those materials in different ways, to suit their instructional agendas and to present information in the best way to their students. They select and they shape.

That’s their direct relationship with content. They also have an intermediary relationship: they stand between the student and the content as a manager and shaper, but also as an interpreter. Students often access learning content through their teacher, because the teacher provides her own interpretation of its meaning and importance.

Teachers have a direct relationship with their students, as well—obviously. Their ability to manage a classroom, transmit knowledge, build skills, and inspire engagement are all critical elements that affect learning. It doesn’t matter how knowledgeable a teacher is in her subject or what brilliant materials she brings into her classroom if she is a poor communicator, a haphazard structurer of learning, or a dull and listless presence.

Part of why teachers matter—human teachers—is that education is a rite-of-passage, a leading of children into adulthood by wise adults within a community. We look to our teachers, as we look to our parents, to give us models of what engaged and caring and knowledgeable adulthood looks like. They’re not just there to grade papers and read from a textbook. They would matter even if they never assigned a paper or used a textbook.

That relationship is not a one-way street. Students have to own their part in the relationship with the teacher. We don’t talk about it often, putting responsibility for everything on the teacher. But students are not potted plants, devoid of any agency. Even the littlest ones are willful, free agents. And if they are going to learn, they have to care, at least a little. They have to try, at least a little. They have to want to learn things and grow. We ask our teachers to engage and inspire, but they can’t force a student to care, or to try. I remember my old headmaster, who led a school full of pretty hard cases, saying that the first step in any student-teacher relationship is convincing students that are things they need help with, and that you are someone who can help them.

As children grow and learn, we have to help them start to take responsibility for their relationships with the content they choose to read and hear and view—to be more than passive consumers or easy prey. We have to teach them the media literacy and critical thinking skills they need to navigate dangerous waters, with our guidance and then, eventually, by themselves. We have to guide them enough that we can trust them to sail solo.

Their learning is their learning. They own it. We adults set certain expectations around what we want them to learn, but those expectations are a floor, not a ceiling. Students explore the world on their own, and they don’t wait for a diploma to start doing it. They will read things and hear things and see things we don’t know about and may not approve of, but that’s part of their exploration and their journey.

Eventually, whether we are parents or classroom teachers, our job is to withdraw the “teacher” role from that triad and let students encounter the world and all of its “content” on their own—with our wise words in their heads and hearts, we hope, but with the training wheels off so that they can roar down the road by themselves.

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