Learning Styles: I hunt, you gather.

11/2/2000 jay

Southern France. 10,000 BC. Before bread. Before cheese. Before wine. Hungry? You went into the forest to hunt down what you could find. Deer? Blackberries? Mushrooms?

Imagine what it would take to excel as a prehistoric hunter. Always alert to the tiniest movement, the slightest sound, a faint scent. Instantly able to grasp the meaning of a twig snapping or a moving shadow amongst the trees. Snapping twig, snap decision, spring to action, snare roebuck, venison for supper. No time to think about it; just do it. Let the mind's autopilot take control. Bursts of energy, time to eat, rest til hungry once again.

Southern France, seven thousand years later. People tend cows, pigs, and chickens. They grow wheat, cauliflower, and apples.

Imagine what it would take to excel as a early farmer. Patience. Storing hay and grain to feed the animals in lean times. Preparing the soil, sowing seeds, nurturing the crops, harvesting the produce, preserving food for the winter. Must always plan ahead, follow the routine, work continually, pay attention, don't get distracted, stay the course.

Southern France, present day. Cafe au lait, baguettes, potage, omelettes, foie gras, fromage, bifstek, tarte tatin, creme brule, vin de Bordeau, petits-fours, Cognac. At the supermarche, flour, beans, ham, eggs, milk, potatoes, bananas, capers, mustard, cornichons, and la pizza. Nothing hunted (except for the fish,) Everything cultivated, The farmers won out over the hunters.

Today, farmer personalities outnumber hunter personalities twenty-to-one.

Paris, twentieth century. The farmers have desk jobs. The are managers, bureaucrats, shopkeepers, aristocrats, soldiers, factory workers, clerks, gendarmes, Metro operators, ushers, and priests, They plan their work and work their plan. They eliminate disorder. Go into a fourth-grade class anywhere in France; everyone is studying the same lesson on the same day -- as dictated by the bureaucrats in Paris.

Meanwhile, the hunters scan the scene from sidewalk cafes, trying to interpret what's going on around them. Minds on autopilot, seeing what others miss, driven by impulse, sipping wine, and often rebuked. As the farmers followed their routines, the hunters left the fields to search for what they could find. Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Le Corbusier, Brigitte Bardot, Jean-Luc Goddard, Alberto Giacometti, Art Buchwald, Marcel Marceau, Jacques Tati, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Salvador Dali, Henry Miller, Claude Monet, Marcel Proust, Auguste Rodin, and Emile Zola. Who cares what other people think?

Hunters learn in different ways than farmers. Hunters enjoy learning by exploring. They like to jump in and see what works. Tom Peters: Do it, try it, fix it. Push the limits. Multisensory. Hunting the lessons, so to speak.

Farmers are more likely to follow instructions and practice things within limits. They want a fence around their field. They love the terroir beneath their feet. They follow the speed limit.

Something buried this deep inside a person is not going to change. Instructional designers must accommodate the differences. Rather than trying futilely to assess a learner's position on the hunter-to-farmer scale, tomorrow's learning environments must provide both field and forest.

Ó 2000, Jay Cross & Internet Time Group, Berkeley, California