A22
Public Record
Excerpt from book.

Mechanical and Fluid Skillsets: An inquiry into learning and developing skills.

Prologue

Although this book is primarily about how people learn, and although I myself am a teacher, it has surprisingly little to do with teaching. This is not a book for my fellow teachers; instead it is for any person interested in how she has learned what she has learned. I don’t doubt that teaching structures could be gleaned from the framework I create here, but that isn’t the intention of this work.

This learning framework investigates two types of learning (as the title of the book suggests), Mechanical and Fluid learning, and their individual impacts on personhood, creativeness, and ultimately, human progress. It is important to note that, while I firmly believe in the tenets of this framework, I would be delusional to think that I have discovered anything new in defining them. Also, I claim no scientific rigor for my findings. These are observations I have taken note of and created a vocabulary around; these are not the result of any in-depth research. My interest is based on observations I have made in my personal learning processes and in those of my students. What is most interesting to me is the implications of these learning types, how they form into useful skills, and how those skills later affect society as a whole.

Introduction

This book is an extensive discussion of something I observed during my tenure as a professor of Music and Music Theory at Wernkle University, spanning twelve years in total. This is a phenomenon that most people acknowledge, but presently lacks the descriptors necessary for any meaningful discussion. More accurately, it seems to be something that people acknowledge, but it hasn’t been awarded the significance that I believe it deserves. This topic may fall under the umbrella of psychology, as it has to do with how the brain learns and performs; it may fall under sociology, as it deals with personhood and what separates and unifies groups of people; it may fall under philosophy, as it discusses the concepts of humanhood; it may even fall under biology, as it discusses the nature of traits and how they are formed. Whichever limb of academia it best fits into, however, I certainly don’t have the credentials to speak with any authority about it. What I have found, though, is that the few people I have described it to were able to: a) understand the concept, b) think of specific examples, and c) use these terms correctly for examples that I described. This was proof enough to me that these concepts exist and are identifiable.

Important terms

I will first define some terms that will be used frequently throughout this book:

Skillset: a combination of talents a person can learn and apply toward an Output. Skillsets are learned through experiences, and can be learned both consciously and unconsciously. Skillsets range from the most basic human tasks to the most specialized.

The term “Output” will describe anything created as a product of a Skillset.

The term “Artist” will describe a person who creates output from her Skillset.

The foundation for this framework is that all skills and Skillsets can be learned in one of two ways: either by the example of another person or through personal experimentation.

The term “Mechanical” describes a skill learned by the emulation and recitation of another person’s Output.
The term “Fluid” describes a Skillset learned through personal experimentation and a refining of those experiments.

It is important to remember that these terms only define how a person learned a Skillset, and they are not delineators of talent or personhood; there is no such thing as a Mechanical or Fluid “person,” but a person who is Mechanical or Fluid within a specific Skillset. Every person is, at some level, Fluid or Mechanical in any Skillset they have encountered.

In describing these concepts, people often ask if Mechanical or Fluid is a spectrum or if it is binary. I don’t believe there is a spectrum for this reason: once a person begins to learn how they will learn something, it seems to me that this creative process would remain consistent throughout her learning process. […]

Thadd J. Cramp