"Experience is the best teacher."
If the foregoing statement was the point of this essay, I would have told you it's the summary because I know some of you have the attention span of a gnat.
There have been many philosophies and methods developed consciously and unconsciously across human existence through which knowledge can be passed on to succeeding generations for any number of purposes including enhancing communal survival. This example is important. Remember it.
With enhanced industrialisation between the nineteenth and twenty-first century, the need to create labourers for the world's industries has led to the formalisation of teaching and training methods, and the actual takeover and standardisation of training activities at all levels by governments planetwide.
Obviously, standardised bread does not all palates please. These standardised training methods have created significant levels of literacy but are found to be woefully insufficient when required to create autonomous, useful, ethical and creative workers. That is a feature; employers generally want drones and robots for the ease of control that they afford, and lower pay that they can accept.
When starting this essay, I was hoping to get to the point quickly. Now look.
While learning by doing has been seen to be the best way to train people for the longest time and is actually used across the planet to great effect, for instance in the training of doctors, soldiers and musicians, it is insufficient in my opinion in quickly creating a deep understanding of the subject matter and delays mastery by a significant amount of time, which can be sometimes measured in years.
I want you to understand at this stage that I define mastery to be the point of competence at which the person in question can see everything in his eyes without looking and explain it in their own language - not Kisii or Kiswahili, but in the peculiar way in which his mind makes sense of things. This language may make sense to him but in most cases he may be unable to explain things to you outright or may do so in a manner that is at best garbled and incomprehensible to you.
The biggest reason why these methods do not work out as they should is that, combining theory and practice in the training of new professionals, people are first taught the names of the things, then how they work then why these things are so, in most instances not even getting to the why. As a result, the learner is usually stuck trying to master names instead of working to master logic, burning years of effort and time before things start to make sense for them; most of the time the student loses the point altogether.
I therefore propose a different approach to teaching: while giving the student a hands-on experience with the subject matter, subject them to an intellectual exercise to explain to them why things are and/or work the way they do, how they do so then the names that we have given these things at the end, so instead of an inverted pyramid which falls all the time, we have a solid foundation built on the creation of masters instead of mere slaves.
This method will work best where the learner's natural inclinations, aptitudes and interests are harnessed instead of being fought like they currently are.