Education, Growth and Discipleship

I was recently reminded of an old study about peer instruction.  I wish i had the reference, but i encountered the paper hanging up in a hallway.  In this study, a group of students were identified who didn't understand a particularly difficult physics concept (something about angular momentum, i think).  They were then taught this concept using as much student-to-student interaction as possible.  A few weeks later, they were asked to teach some other students in a class that was a few weeks behind them in the curriculum.  They did this surprisingly well, often better than the professors, because they understood from experience where the confused students were going wrong.  However six months later, when asked to teach another group of students the same concept, they did very poorly because (and this is what blew me away) they had no idea how to think about the problem in any way other than the right way.  In the intervening months, they had completely digested the new learning and now their natural thought processes led them only to the correct answer.

The obvious moral of the story is that it pays to attack difficult learning experiences in groups so you can help each other over the subtle pitfalls the professors have forgotten.  More interesting, i think, is the implication for how the learning process affects you.  Within a few months of taking on new learning, students' brains had rewired so that they didn't have to think about the concepts anymore; they were 'obvious'.  From these 'obvious' concepts could be built more challenging concepts which in turn became obvious.  After a year or two of this, students begin to think in complicated ways; they are rewarded for thinking like a scientist.  Let this go on long enough and the school will give you a diploma certifying that you are a scientist because what naturally comes to mind when you look at the world is a scientific mode of thinking.

I find this idea that you can, in a sense, change what you are by guided practice fascinating, and particularly so when applied to the task of 'becoming a better Christian'.  Given the colossal failure of very eloquent professors in any sort of controlled study to teach difficult concepts without peer interaction, it seems that listening to sermons is probably not enough.  (I am definitely not saying here that we should skip Biblical instruction any more than we should skip class.)  The education research suggests that if we don't help each other work through real-world, messy problems we will learn at a glacial pace and often what we thought we learned will be wrong.  Fortunately we have a fellowship of believers and a wide selection of temptations, moral choices and holy disciplines (prayer, giving, worship, etc.) to work through.  Since the Church is very large, ideally we should form into smaller units of increasing closeness (say, denominations, congregations, small groups).  If we've done this properly, we should see small groups of people in similar life stages rehearsing everything they've learned together, helping each other apply what they've learned to existing problems and bringing issues to the larger groups.

Okay, so no profound insight there.  This more or less matches an existing practice that is observed to work well.  (Aside: I wonder if there are churches where issues from the small groups get fed back into the larger assembly)  But what have we actually learned and what does success look like?  I sometimes get the impression that churches believe we would behave more like Jesus if we just knew more about Him; if we knew 'What Would Jesus Do' then we'd be all set.  This seems unreasonable to me.  I can't behave like Jesus when confronting overwhelming temptation any more than i can behave like Richard Feynman when confronting quantum field theory.  Yes i have the Holy Spirit living in me, but in practice i can only behave like myself with small perturbations.  Much better, i think, to go through the disciplines and difficulties set before me with a group of fellow believers to help me through the subtleties.  In a few months or years i should find that i act more like Jesus because i am more like Jesus.  Then i won't need to be constantly worried about 'What Would Jesus Do?'; it will be obvious.