JSB on Education Explicit Versus Tacit Knowldge

Logan, my neighbour Eddie's son has been helping Eddie build our new kitchen. Logan has been working with his Dad for several years and now is about 10. A visitor asked him the other day if he wanted to be a carpenter when he grew up. I replied for him and told her that as far as I was concerned Logan is a carpenter. This got me thinking again about people who really learn and those that go to school. When Logan is 18 he will really know carpentry. How will someone aged 23 who goes to school to "learn carpentry" compete? How will a 22 year old who graduates from Sheridan compete with my son James who has been an artist and a geek since he was 8 be able to compete?

There is a myth here that simply taking a course will prepare one for a skill. here is John Seely Brown on the topic

Knowledge has two dimensions, the explicit and the tacit. The explicit dimension deals with concepts, the know-whats, whereas the tacit dimension deals with know-how.

Know-how is best manifested in work practices and skills. Since the tacit lives in action it comes alive in and through doing things and in participation with each other and the world. As a consequence, tacit knowledge can be distributed between people in terms of a shared understanding that slowly emerges from working together, a point that we will return to.

Jerome Brunner made a brilliant observation some time ago when he said that we can teach people about a subject matter, for example, physics. That is, we can teach them the concepts, conceptual frameworks and facts of physics—the explicit knowledge of physics. But that does not make the student a physicist. To be a physicist he must also learn the practices of this profession. So learning to be a physicist as opposed to learning about physics requires growing (through situated learning) a column down the middle of the above diagram that starts to create a platform for the rich interplay between the tacit and the explicit. (This interplay is best characterized as "knowing" and it lives in the action of deliberate inquiry where the concepts, heuristics, laws and algorithms comprising the explicit function as tools for action–deliberate inquiry.) This, of course, is where real expertise lies. Learning this expertise requires learning the practices of deliberate inquiry of that discipline and how to best utilize the conceptual tools—the explicit—in support of that inquiry. And learning this involves a kind of immersion and enculturation—a way of seeing, interpreting and acting.