[Herbert] Spencer believed that science was exposing the nature of human learning. Learning was a property of the mind, and he conceived of the mind as a biological organ on the model of the body: "the mind like the body has a predetermined course of evolution". ... The reason we have been so ineffective in understanding the nature of human learning and in devising effective educational programs that foster mental growth is that beliefs like Spencer's continue to dominate psychological research on human learning. The largely unused key to understanding human learning, and the key to understanding what is wrong with educational proposals supposedly based on our natural forms of learning, is tied in with our peculiar relationship with tools.

I find it useful to begin reflecting on this peculiar relationship by considering Michael Polanyi's example of how we oddly extend our senses into the tools we use. Imagine being in a completely dark cave, feeling your way with a walking stick. What you feel is the impress of the head of the stick against your hand. But what you "feel" in the mind is the end of the stick against hard, flinty rock or soft, mushy moss or whatever. We have a peculiar way of incorprating our tools into our sensorium. Think of driving a car. All those bodily movements one makes are melded so that we incorporate the car. We alter our focus from what feet, legs, hands, arms, and so on are doing, and we attend rather to what our automobiled-body does. Many animals use tools, and some also have abilities to use symbols, but in neither case are the physical or cognitive tools incorporated as in humans. ...

My point is that with the accumulation of cognitive tools, such as language, then literacy, then theoretic abstractions, and so on, our ability to learn is enlarged but is also constrained by the tools that are enlarging it, just as the telescope enlarges some particular object by constraining our field of vision. That is, the tools we use, when learning, shape and very largely determine what and how we can learn. So, runs my argument, if you want to understand human learning, you need to understand the cognitive tools that are being deployed in the process...

Let me try an analogy that might underline what I mean. You have to explain how five tons of stones were moved from the mason's yard to the back of a garden. Study of the musculature and skeleton and so on of the human body has exposed fairly precisely what is involved in a person lifting and moving a stone. To try to explain how the five tons of stones got across town in terms of human muscles, bones, joints, sinews, while ignoring the pallet lifter, the truck that drove the stones across the town, the cherry picker that lowered them onto the driveway, and the wheelbarrow that was used to carry them to where they were lifted into place to make a raised garden, would be a bit odd. (The example is currently close to my heart, and closer to my aching knees and back.)

It would be even odder if you recognized that the knowledge about muscles, skeletons, and so on could not account for the tonnage moved over the stated distance in the given time and, in response to this recognition, you recommended that more detailed research on muscles, skeleton, and perhaps knees was the way to go in order to solve the problem, still ignoring the truck and other tools. Or, if you want to explain the building of the pyramids in ancient Egypt, you would be unwise to study how their bodies might be able to handle the task while ignoring the uses of hydraulic lifting systems. For Stonehenge, study of the deployment of barges, rollers, and levers might prove more useful than looking for something distinctive about the workers' bodies.

The analogy is supposed to suggest that understanding human learning, especially from the perspective of parents and teachers who want to help children learn, will not likely be much helped by increasingly refined studies of the nature of learning. We would do better to attend to the cognitive tools that students deploy when they learn. In the analogy, the mechanics of the body is equivalent to the nature of learning. We can indeed study how a body lifts and moves stones. Ignoring the truck and wheelbarrow is like ignoring the cognitive shaping that language, literacy, and other symbolic tools give to our learning.

Take language as a major cognitive tool; it in turn breaks down into a set of smaller tools that come along with it. All language users, for example, to take the items Deacon mentioned above, "cannot help but see the world in symbolic categorical terms, dividing it up according to opposed features, and organizing our lives according to themes and narratives." We can see here at least two somewhat distinctive cognitive tools: use of oppositions to gain a conceptual grasp on the world, and use of narrative to shape our experience into emotionally meaningful events. We might go on to explore, for example, how we might represent the world in narrative terms to children for whom this becomes a major tool of learning. It is not a "natural" form of learning; it is a product of deploying an internalized cultural tool that comes along with language. We might make inventories of the cognitive tools we pick up as we grow into particular societies and then consider how these can be used in increasing the effectiveness of children's learning (something I have done in a preliminary way in "The Educated Mind").

Now obviously our use of these cognitive tools is tied into our "nature." But study of the nature of learning avoids precisely the range of distinctive cultural acquisitions that provides these tools. The tools will differ from culture to culture, whereas researchers who seek to expose the nature of human learning try to exclude those features that seem to be products of cultural conditioning. Researchers have wanted to get "below" these. My point is that there is no there there -- or, at least, the accumulation of cultural tools and the profound influence they have on our learning makes it almost impossible, except with pre-language infants, to expose basic principles of natural learning....

I contend that the congnitive transformations brought on by our internalizing prominent features of our cultural environments offer educators more practical knowledge about learning and cognitive development than the kind of psychology that still dominates educational thinking about these topics....

What do I mean by cognitive tools? Well, in part I mean what Vygotsky meant, and I have elaborated another part in "The Educated Mind". Alex Kozulin characterizes them as "those cultural artifacts -- signs, symbols, texts, formulae, graphic-symbolic devices -- that help individuals master their own 'natural' psychological functions". I want to show in detail how such large-scale cognitive tools, such as oral language, literacy, and theoretic abstractions, have smaller-scale tools inherent in them, such as -- for language -- metaphor recognition and formation, story-structure recognition and formation, fantasy, forming binary structures and mediating them, rhyme, rhythm, and meter, and forming mental images from words. Similar sets come along with literacy and with theoretic abstractions. Understanding how these tools shape our learning can give us a better set of principles for improving the effectiveness of students learning than anything progressivism can provide.