Very few people will know what I mean when I say Osmotic learning, but hopefully more will be familiar with the terms unconscious or Implicit learning. A thing that is implicit just is, and something learned implicitly just is learnt.
Despite what the modern world seems to believe; with schools, colleges, universities. E-learning, short courses, night class, classroom based career development courses, and many more things besides; a majority of human knowledge is still learned implicitly it is still absorbed almost accidentally like fluids passing from one place to another through osmosis. One reason the modern world struggles to accept that unconscious learning is one of the major sources of our knowledge about the world around us is that allot of this knowledge is so implicit as to not be thought of as knowledge, after all the sky is blue, water is wet, and things fall down when you drop them, we don’t consider these things to be knowledge to be things we have learnt, but in fact they are.
For the most part though, this osmotic knowledge is more to do with society, social norms, body language and hand gestures, we learn these things not by being taught them but by seeing them over and over again and by living them.
So why is this important for the dojo? I hear you cry out in frustration as I ramble on. For several reasons this is perhaps the most important thing to remember when teaching in a dojo.
The first reason is because your students are absorbing everything, even if it doesn’t seem like it, and this unconscious undirected absorption of knowledge can be a blessing or a curse. Students will pick up bad habits from each other and importantly from you by accident, without ever being taught them. Students will learn behaviour, what is and isn’t acceptable. Students will learn forms of address, use of language, and where to stand. In the dojo where this isn’t considered and where the instructor ignores this accidental learning the result is random, so it is important.
The second reason is what your student brings with them. Every student has a life time of knowledge, whether it’s a 6 year life time, or a 60 year life time. The ‘classroom’ knowledge they bring with them isn’t really a big concern, this knowledge was learnt in the classroom so it’s there as an education to be used and taken up when needed but it lies passive, dormant, for the most part. The osmotic knowledge they bring with them however is never quite so willing to stay quiet, instead it leaps out of them in every word and gesture, every thought and feeling. Ask a student new through your dojo doors with no training at all to punch a punch bag. 80% of students will throw a right handed hook. Why? Because this is how you throw a punch, this is what a punch looks like. Who taught your student that? books, radio, but mostly TV. However if you look at a baby, or toddler hit something they don’t throw a hook, they hit hammer fist from above the head downward… why? Because we are descended from apes and this motion is how our muscles are designed to exert force from birth; though mainly for climbing and clinging. But this isn’t the only osmotic knowledge, the thought most fights start with a right hook leads our students astray, the idea that certain ‘truths’ exist means there is allot of falsehood we should be aware of and looking to adjust.
The third reason is yourself, you have learnt all these things by osmosis too, all these implicit and unconscious things through your life, you bring them with you into the dojo, and you give them to your students by the spade load. You might tell your students that fighting almost always ends in a grab, but when they watch you fight you never grab. So you are teaching them that fights don’t always end in a grab and also that you lie. Contradicting yourself with unconscious learning even as you push forward conscious knowledge. Your expectations and beliefs about fighting, your martial art, even the world around you are implicit in your actions and absorbed by your students.
We all have things we have learnt by osmosis that affect our beliefs of competition, sport, training, fighting, self defence, by looking at what osmotic knowledge we are bringing to these things, and what osmotic knowledge we are developing in the dojo we can enhance our training and the training around us.
We can however can start to guide osmotic learning, and we already do without thinking about it, by bringing skilled students and respectful students into being senpai and by praising students for doing things well.
And as a final note, if you want a book that is about something entirely different but still has some interesting points about osmotic absorbed knowledge and ideas, try Try Gift of Fear by Gavin Debecker.