The History of Quantum Learning
New and emerging educational technologies, especially computer-based and Internet-based technologies, provide opportunities for new educational methods. The most amazing change in educational traditions is the change of instruction; more and more instructors are changing the entire curriculum from teaching to designing or recognizing and acknowledging better managed and personalized learning methods. This change from teaching to learning has a close analogy with the new understanding of the role and reasons of space geometry around any massive object. "The space is telling the body how to move, and the body is telling the space how to curve."
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The interplay between massive objects and space is metaphor for a relationship between instructor and the learning environment. The modern changes of education involve design of learning environment; the professors change the learning environment, and learning environment will lead students to effective, self-directed learning.
The second major change in educational practices today has direct analogies with our deep understanding of fundamental particles. Although some fundamental particles are absolutely identical, they may have different energy and orientation in the space. The students in any formal and informal learning group are different. Each student, for each task has different believes, prior knowledge, skills, and understanding. Each student will have different learning curl to reach the readiness to work on the task. This preliminary readiness is the key to quantum learning. In the so called quantum learning, students enjoy the opportunity to learn according to their personal needs and preferences. Instead of sorting students, the future professors will identify their personal needs with higher precision, and will design opportunities for each student. This type of learning was impossible in the old educational system, except for some rich people who can effort to pay to private tutors. In the past, the educational research took months to identify what is going on in the school. The educational system was conservative with iron rules. Today, technologies are giving hope for a change. Due to new technologies, the individualized learning will be just a question of design and development. One impossible task - to serve students as individuals, will be the job of future professor.
One learning theory that implies some quantum ideas to human learning is the Gestalt Theory. According to the theory of Gestalt, operational principle of the brain is holistic, in contrast to the "atomistic" principle of operation of the digital computer, where every computation is broken down into a sequence of simple steps, each of which is computed independently of the problem as a whole.
A second idea in the direction of quantum learning, which is one step ahead of Gestalt Theory, is the Suggestologia/De-suggestologia developed by Bulgarian educator and psychologist, Dr. Lozanov. Prof. Lozanov, who has been a leading educator in the field of accelerated learning since 1970,.believed that powerful learning must engage both the analytical brain and the emotional brain, along with conscious and unconscious mind.
In any holistic model of human learning, the principle of the Dutch physicist, Christian Huygens (1629 - 1695), should be integrated as a part of holistic learning. Huygens' principle is about wave propagation. According to Huygens' principle, every point of the wave front may be regarded as a source of a new spherical wave named wavelet. The propagation of the wave is actually a result of interference of all spherical wavelets a moment later. This principle is helpful for understanding some social aspects of human learning. Also, the notion of the flow of knowledge and understanding makes perfect sense. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, people learn well in the Zen-like flow. The picture below (generated with Blender) illustrates the wave explanation of social learning with the waves interactions.
According to quantum physics, particles and waves are simultaneous characteristic of all quantum objects.
Thinking is a process of understanding how reality works -- therefore, if, in its deeper nature, the reality is quantum, the learning needs to move its believes toward quantum realities. It is my believe, that learning should be probabilistic and wave-like, but also, of course learning is deterministic and with well defined trajectory in the space of knowledge, feeling, and action.
Any attempt to disconnect logical-sequential learning from emotional and behavioral learning is one-sided and has only theoretical but not practical value. In real-life, the logical learning, emotional learning, and our behavior and motivation are connected at any step as elements of our learning.