Education is habit-forming

This phrase has been banging on a door in my brain for weeks. Kind of a cute play on words, suitable for bumper-stickers, like a slogan for a progressive advocacy group or draconian "reforms" (think Hugs not drugs, No Child Left Behind, etc.). But no, what I really have in mind is a Theory of Everything, a la formalism, pragmatism, behaviorism, positivism. In rough outline:

1. Childhood training frames lifelong behavior and attitudes. (Duh)
2. If reading, making art, music, movement, problem solving, etc., are commonplace in childhood, then those abilities will be exercised and extended in adulthood. (Double-duh)
3. The "content knowledge" and "skills" - the stuff that can be tested and quantified - are retained only if the adult keeps reading, keeps making art, etc. Use it or lose it. So the real education is in forming the habit of doing things - listening, questioning the premise of an argument, trying out new stuff, playing, doing algebra - not just taking in information.
4. So practice, practice, practice. Which we all do, all the time.
5. Those who practice reading and memorizing text form the habit of reading and memorizing text. Those who practice improvizing rap lyrics become improvizers of lyrics. Those who practice shouting down or interrupting whoever is in the room get promoted to management.

Whoa. Sorry for the global mind trip from belaboring the obvious to universal karmic generalization. Like everything is totally everything, ya know? Must be some kind of post-midlife bump in the road that I'm trying to process. Blog as shock-absorber.

There is nothing new here, you will notice. Maybe what I'm getting at is a re-emphasis on the neglected epistemological category of dispositional knowledge (tending to...) - as well as propositional knowledge (knowing that...) and procedural knowledge (knowing how to...). Those latter two are the familiar "content" and "skills" that are most easily measured, so they become important by default because schools have to justify what they do with hard numbers.

I'm reminded of a respected education professor at OSU whose catch-phrase "positive approach tendencies" (PAT) summed up a highly structured, goal-directed approach to teaching and learning. Briefly, if you set up the conditions that make early successes highly probable, people will feel rewarded by getting the right answer and want to do it again. Of course, the devil is in the details, so you can condition people to do any number of mindless or destructive things. Or you can train them in the skills to read, compute, etc., but they might never pick up a book, even though they can.

What am I saying? Aside from the feel-good, motivational sound of "education is habit-forming" (Baseball fever...catch it!), lies a circular argument about practice that no one is likely to copyright, patent, or bottle: if reading the book (playing the game, watching the video, talking the talk) becomes a habit, then it was educational; if it was an educational experience, it became a habit. Neurons fired in an unused quadrant of the brain, and each time they fired made it more likely that they would fire again, so neuron pathways were blazed and networks developed with other neurons. Inversely, no habit, no education. Know habit, know education. Oooooh, another bumper sticker!