Petrification Of Ability

I strongly believe that a human can learn anything. But there are some strong learning myths in education that still prevail.

Myths

There do not exist specific learner types, like visual leaner, that impact the performance in learning. It’s a bogus myth.

Also, a growth mindset does also not improve learning performance. See:

• To What Extent and Under Which Circumstances Are Growth Mind-Sets Important to Academic Achievement? Two Meta-Analyses
• Do Growth Mindset Interventions Impact Students’ Academic Achievement? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis With Recommendations for Best Practices

So education already has some problems with teaching. But that is beside the point.

Petrification in Action

What happens when you “finish” education? After getting your degree? People often used the phrase “I finished my education”. It couldn’t be more wrong and dangerous.

I see a phenomenon of people that simply stop learning. They learn an important part of a field and then just stop. An artist that stops improving, a scientist that desperately claws at an idea that was disproven over and over again. With that myths prevail and get carried to the next generation.

A programmer earning his master degree only knowing python, not being able to solve common basic programmer tasks/problems. It’s not about bashing someone that has not the ability to solve common problems. But instead asking why didn’t he learn it? He clearly has shown the ability to learn.

It seems that optimizing for a degree does not necessary mean getting the best education. The sad part is that then people think they don’t have to learn the “basics” anymore because they know so much more advance concepts and ideas. There is always something to learn.

To learn something means to change your behavior, people keep their learned bad behavior. In Art, education, programming, relationships, etc.

Sometimes it’s a big problem to unlearn bad behavior, it’s one thing to learn something new and to unlearn something learned.

When people stop learning and just keep their current ability I call it the Petrification of Ability. In programmers, I see it when talking about dynamic and static type systems. One swearing on the productivity boost while discarding the other. Its unclear if a type system for a programming language even has real productivity changes. It’s clear that people feel that it changes something.

I personally believe that people work in static languages more and then when trying a language like Python they try to solve problems like in their static language and are confused. Something similar happens when people talk about S-Expressions and lisp syntax. They see:

(defn Hello [name] 
    (str "Hello, " name "!"))

And are confused by the parenthesis. Seeing new patterns and structures that where never used in your commonly used language results in confusion. People then argue that the other language is “confusing” or “inconsistent”.

Instead of trying to learn something new, they discard it. They petrify their ability.

Years of Experience

Another incredible problem is when people start to associate experience with ability or skill. If you have 40 years of experience programming. Someone would assume you actually can program. Sadly if they petrified their ability 35 years ago directly after finishing education they may have some strong old believes and habits learned in ancient times.