While I was looking into the history of incidental learning, I stumbled across a thorough write-up of what incidental learning entails. One of the citations pointed to a very critical article written by Brian Rude entitled “The case against Incidental Learning.” – the accusations he makes are interesting and worth addressing.
Rude’s argument centers around the alphabet, and how “learning your ABCs” does not give a person knowledge of all aspects of the alphabet – for example, the number of letters between ‘d’ and ‘l’, or which letter is five letters after ‘n’. He says that whether this knowledge is useful or not is by the by, but I think the whole argument swings on it.
What Rude overlooks is that there is nothing inherent in our usage of the ABCs that would lend itself to developing a familiarity with the place a letter has in the alphabet. The way we would typically answer these questions – counting the letters off on our fingers while we sound out the alphabet – is perfectly adequate given the infrequency that such a task will come up. If you take a Scrabble player, though, and ask how many points any given letter is worth, and there’s a good chance they will know. This is because while it’s not the aim of the game to know these numbers, it does help to bear them in mind when coming up with high-scoring words.
On the other hand, the number of each letter in the alphabet doesn’t help with much. When we’re concerned with the order of letters, we’re mostly arranging things in order, and don’t care beyond what comes before and after a letter. Rude admits that even concerted effort fails to lodge this information securely.
Basically, a skill or fact must bear relevance to the task at hand if it is to be remembered. Irrelevant things fall by the wayside, and no form of learning – incidental or directed – will keep them in our minds.
Another thing Rude mentions is the difference between directed (formal) and incidental learning in music, and how he believes that someone who lacks formal training will never be able to grasp the difference between a major and a minor chord. I have a bone to pick with that conclusion too, but that’s another matter.