Some students learn deep; others skim the surface. So what’s new about this?

The problem is that Deep or Surface Learning is not an attribute of the learner or individual. The same person may use both approaches at different times.

Let’s also get this right: no one is a deep learner across all subjects at all times. Most of us are deep learners sometimes; we skim the surface at other times.

Ok, what distinguishes Deep and Surface Learning styles? And is Surface Learning really all that bad, as educationists are making it out to be?

Here’s a academic short list:

If all this makes you believe that Surface Learning is totally flawed, well, you could be dead wrong.

Many educationists will tell you that students who get through their grades by doing only what is required (i.e. assessed in exam) and experience them as a chore, have not really learned anything; therefore, they would not be able to perform as competent professionals in their chosen field.

This is simply not true.

Many surface learners do become very able practitioners in their fields. Take doctors or engineers from top institutes like IITs, for example. The curriculum in medical colleges and IITs is such that the students usually see no other way of managing it except by "going through the motions". This is a kind of strategic Surface Learning! They survive and pass their exams.

Then it all comes alive in bits and pieces as they encounter life in its myriad facets and problems! They do manage to learn quickly to cope with life's many vicissitudes, rather successfully.

The problem is in the assumption that learning only happens in classrooms in schools and colleges. That is the process that most educationists see and analyze, blinkered by their own self-importance.

But it doesn’t work that way. Learning happens all the time, over the whole career of the student. The role of classroom learning is relatively very small.

Often, the educational contribution of classroom teaching is at the level of process: in Europe and the US, consulting firms, for example, are the major employers of “classics” graduates. How can the ability to dissect a passage of Shakespeare a necessary qualification for checking out a potential target firm for acquisition? 

Perhaps Shakespeare’s insight into the venality of men might foster the requisite skepticism in the business deal.

But more than that, it is the rigour and the analytical mind-set which matters. 

Most IITians can work 18-hours a day for months, without a break, in any field. That ability to work  hard, particularly in areas you are not passionate about, does matter in real life.

This is the same reason why lawyers make excellent politicians – in India as well as in the US. Both professions are about winning arguments regardless of their merits!

Educationists also deride 'rote-learning’ to be Surface Learning and, therefore, bad.

But it goes beyond that. What is important is the “intention” behind the rote-learning. If you are rote-learning in order to have facts at your fingertips to be slotted into your arguments (that is what a top notch lawyer, for instance, would do!), that is not Surface Learning. That is Strategic Learning!

However, if you are rote-learning merely in order to be able to list things (because you think that is sufficient for the exam), then that could be called Surface Learning. Who knows, if you retain those facts in memory, someday, you may relook at them and understand their importance and connections with real life.

As a teacher, you may agonise about a student's position on the Bloom’s Taxonomy framework, but there is nothing like being faced with real-world problems (with money,  livelihood, etc) to concentrate the mind.

In the final analysis, Deep Learning may be gratifying for the teacher and Surface Learning may be a chore for the student. 

But does that really matter much in the long run?

Perhaps what matters is something else.