Preface x Today this is less true. Cognitive science, a field I also had a big part in creating, has become more important in the academic world. Training, and e-learning, the first new field to come about as a result of our work at my new institute (for better or for worse, I am not too fond of most e-learning work) have become more important to think about within the academic context, in part because online courses are seen as potential revenue producers. So, while there is still no learning profession per se, there is much interest in what learning is about. This book is meant to address the issue of what learning really is, in or out of school, and to answer the question: How does learning really work? The questions that follow from the answer to that question are: e What kinds of learning situations occur naturally? e How can we focus education (and training and e-learning) on those types of situations in a new paradigm? e What would teaching look like in this new paradigm? e If what we know about how learning works is antithetical to how school works, then what can we do? Answering these questions is one goal of this book. Another goal of this book is to think seriously about what it means to teach. Typically, we look at teaching in precisely the way that our system forces us to look at it. There are subjects and there are experts, and experts talk about their subjects to students who listen to what they have to say. This idea is not only archaic—it is wrong. In the his- tory of humankind, teaching could never have looked this way. Until recently, teaching always meant apprenticeship. We are set up to be apprentices, to learn by doing with help from a mentor. We have done this since the beginning of time. When learning became academic in nature, when students were expected to become scholars, all this changed—anzd it didn’t change for the better. Teaching started to mean talking, and talking is a terrible way to teach. People aren’t really that good a