How is unreflected, unconscious art or craft passed on? A student looks at dozens, hundreds, thousands of masterworks, learns to understand the slang of professionals as one learns a native language (without handbooks or dictionaries, just “from talking”), constantly watches real masters work, and tries to copy it — just like the proverb “monkey see, monkey do”. Then three out of ten students get some proper rails in their heads for the train of their professional thoughts, and they begin to think fast and make few mistakes. And in seven out of ten, they don’t, and they make a lot of errors. Teaching art or a craft is not “imparting conceptual knowledge”.
We need nine out of ten to be able to learn (it is conceivable that there will be one incapable person out of ten, but not seven out of ten). This means that we have to take for teaching such counterintuitive knowledge that cannot come quickly to the students themselves, make a minimal compact and comprehensible definition of it (conceptual! So that it can be expressed in words!), and then somehow pass it on to students so that it’s built into their heads. The question is: Does this happen in areas that have traditionally been considered “art” and which it was thought could not be taught rationally? Yes, it happens, all over the place! This is the way of Western civilization: to turn “art” (including the art of thinking) once modeled and rationalized into a rapidly conceptualized person-to-person mastery in the course of structured learning.
When you find the right concepts and the right thought operations with them, and the right exercises to speed up “automatization” of thinking, to get fluency in thinking — then students after training will not even realize what they had difficulty doing before training. They will be unable to remember what rails their thinking was on before the training, and so they will marvel at the behavior of untrained beginners, including their own behavior in the period before mastering this or that practice. Ask a child why he was very bad at multiplication just a year ago-he will not be able to explain why. Now multiplication is quite natural for him, and it does not require the mental powers as it did a year ago.
