Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career

by Scott H. Young

Transfer has been called the “Holy Grail of education.” It happens when you learn something in one context, say in a classroom, and are able to use it in another context, say in real life. Although this may sound technical, transfer really embodies something we expect of almost all learning efforts—that we’ll be able to use something we study in one situation and apply it to a new situation. Anything less than this is hard to describe as learning at all. Unfortunately, transfer is also something that, despite more than a century of intense work and research, has largely failed to occur in formal education.

“We expect that there will be transfer of learning, for example, from a high school course in introductory psychology to a college-level introduction to psychology course. It has been known for years, however, that students who enter college having taken a high school psychology course do no better than students who didn’t take psychology in high school. Some students who have taken a psychology course in high school do even worse in the college course.”

formal discipline theory. This theory suggested that the brain was analogous to a muscle, containing fairly general capacities of memory, attention, and reasoning, and that training those muscles, irrespective of the content, could result in general improvement. This was the predominant theory behind universal instruction in Latin and geometry, on the idea that it would help students think better. Thorndike was able to refute this idea by showing that the ability to transfer was much narrower than most people had assumed.