Uscolia

by Gabriel Lanyi

Learning without teaching – a journey to the land of native fluency

The human brain is a brilliant self-learning machine, proficient at rule-building and pattern-recognition. What we generally refer to as “teaching” – an instructor conveying knowledge to a student and then testing the amount of information absorbed – is an illusion. We are fooled into thinking that schools can teach us anything, because in the midst of all the wasted instruction, they also provide some necessary exposure, which the brain utilizes for learning. But all learning is in fact internal, beginning and ending inside the brain.

Beyond the illusion of teaching

We all acquire our native languages without fail and without any teaching proper – by exposure, observation and imitation. Understanding this process provides valuable insight into the brain’s method of learning, and reveals how we can achieve effective learning without teaching in other areas as well.

A first-hand account of the legendary Uscolian studios

Uscolia tells of an extraordinary journey to the island of Uscolia, where there are no schools, and generations of creative youths acquire fluency in various disciplines such as music, math, and sciences without teaching, in free-flowing facilities called studios. The author also describes his hands-on experience in applying Uscolian principles within the context of an ordinary family home.

Discover the capacity for native fluency and learning without teaching in Uscolia.

182 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 11, 2016

About the author

Gabriel Lanyi is a writer living in Jerusalem. Early on he was booked as a passenger on a multilingual educational journey across three continents, which began in Romania, continued in Israel, and ended in the US. He eventually got off at the juncture of liberal arts and high-tech, where he set up shop as a writer slash editor slash translator of technical and academic literature, with occasional forays into fiction. All along, he continued to watch with fascination the itineraries our education systems devised for the younger generations, and every now and then inflicted his own teaching on unsuspecting students. Then he discovered Uscolia and became one of a handful of people to hear the first-hand account of the legendary Uscolian studios—where generations of creative youths have achieved effective learning without teaching—from one of the few outsiders who had the privilege of visiting them in person. He subsequently acquired hands-on experience applying some of the Uscolian principles, which he describes in some detail in his latest book.
In answer to the question, “Is Uscolia to be taken literally?” the author said, “Yes.” He then added: “Uscolian principles were born out of experience, not experiment or theory. Academic writing on education is busy fitting abstract, arbitrary models to the reality of the classroom. The models originate in the head of the writers, who then try to interpret experience according to these models. They squeeze reality into ill-fitting patterns, and with a straight face make up inane terms like commognitive, mediatization, agentic factors, and countless others; they create digital classifications in an analog world, categorizing, conceptualizing, and operationalizing that which should be fluid, continuous, natural. Uscolians make a point of not reading any of this drivel. Instead, they observe closely how their children develop since the time they are tiny babies, and try to infer from one area (the acquisition of their native language) to other areas (for example, music). In this process they reach some generalizations that, yes, I would take literally.”
Today, Uscolian insights are more important than ever. With self-learning machines poised to outlearn humans, every province of knowledge where we can retain an advantage becomes vital. It is unlikely that anyone alive today could beat Watson on the SATs. If SATs are going to be our guiding light, we are doomed. The last dominion of homo sapiens is creativity, the one mental faculty that is still difficult to define, and hence difficult for machines to master. To forestall becoming dispensable, we have only Uscolia to look to. Uscolian learning is aimed directly at nurturing creativity, and "Uscolia," the book, can give us a good idea how to go about it.

Reviews

[Rhona Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compulsory read for parents and teachers

I cannot recall why I started reading this book, but it blew my mind - both as an educator (food for thought on how to make learning and teaching in my subjects more explorative rather than what it is at the moment) and as a parent (why didn't the author write this book 21 years ago? So many missed opportunities!)

I could only read bite-sized bits of it - big ideas need time to be mulled over - but finally finished it. Thank you - I learnt so much!

[James Turner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unique perspective

A true way of learning. It's true that we are not taught how to talk. We learn it by being exposed to it and doing it. I really enjoyed this. As a classroom aide I am trying to implement some of it for our students.

[Lori L (She Treads Softly) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Uscolia: Learning without Teaching by Gabriel Lanyi is a look at a utopian form of education. The educational ideals are presented as being developed and used on a fictional modest size island located on the 49th parallel separating the US from Canada, and about 170 miles from both Seattle and Vancouver.

"All newborns are created equal. But a day later they no longer are. This is the motto of Uscolia, the land of native fluency and of learning without teaching.
Imagine the earth as a gigantic experiment in learning. Every minute 256 babies are born with brains identically wired for inquiry and knowledge. A minute later, however, each newborn in its crib, cradle, bassinet, basket, or carry cot is exposed to different signals that begin to shape its brain, and each one embarks on a separate trajectory leading to a different adventure. It is called life. The way the stimuli are organized and presented to these newborns determines the path they take through life. If you are aware of it, you can help guide its course to a considerable extent. But you must have a path marked, or at least a direction of travel mapped out at birth or close thereafter. Uscolians believe that they have discovered such a path." (from uscolia.com.)

The postulate is that teaching is a fiction. It doesn't work and doesn't need to exist in order for learning to take place. Learning is internal, not external. Native fluency acquisition, or "nativism," "involves frequent repetition, no explanations, no testing, lots of play, and human interaction." If children are given the opportunity to discover music, math, languages, etc. they will. "Learning is self-supporting and exponential, so that all knowledge already acquired facilitates further acquisition (one reason why early exposure is so important). The enablers of native fluency (usually the parents) can give more than they have. Native fluency acquired in any field changes the brain."

Many of the ideas here are not new and can be found in other books and guides that have more easily accessible language and are presented in a usable format. The ideas are quite common in the homeschool community where parents may combine what is viewed as more formal educational techniques with unstructured and self-directed learning based entirely on the interests of the child, or may take an entirely unschooled approach to education, as Uscolia suggests is so revolutionary. My background is both professional educator and homeschooler who educated her children entirely apart from the system. I wouldn't recommend Uscolia as a guide to those who want to take this journey - unless you have a privileged background and the means to either pay for the services of or finance a commune of like-minded people who have all the skills and patience needed to love and enrich the life of your child with languages, math, and music, etc..

While it is an interesting book about learning and education, executing the ideas presented won't be even remotely attainable by most people. It is presented as fiction, but is most certainly meant to be a treatise on a better plan for learning than our current educational system.

[Golan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is actually a utopia – which is not surprising; its title pretty much says it. Just like "Utopia" is the "noplace" where all the social problems of 16h century England and Europe are solved, "Uscolia" is the "noschool" where all contemporary educational problems are solved. In that sense, just like Utopia must be taken with a grain of salt, although it raises important political questions, many of which remain valid today, so must Uscolia be taken with a grain of salt, although it too provides a lucid critique of many educational principles that today we consider axiomatic, and makes some radical proposals for replacing them. To illustrate how these proposals would look if actually implemented, the author takes us to the imaginary island of Uscolia, in the Pacific Ocean, someplace along the 49th parallel dividing the US and Canada. It is an island so insignificant that neither country bothered to claim it, which allowed it to develop its own political system, which seems to be first and foremost an educational system based on the absence of schools. What replaces schools in Uscolia are studios, institutions of a type that no human society to date has thought of establishing. Amazingly, the Uscolian studio happens to be, among many other things, also an art studio, and it evolved historically from such a studio. In time, however, it took on additional functions, including that of a boarding school, where children can stay as long as they want, a concert hall, a zoo, a botanical garden, a data processing lab, and a community center where children and adults can initiate any type of activity for which they find takers. There are no teachers at the studio, and no classrooms, but all kinds of projects are being run that result in serious leaning in practically all areas of knowledge. Attendance at the studio is not mandatory and you show up if and when you feel like it. But why wouldn’t you want to attend, and what could be more fun than playing with puzzles, weaving your own cloths, making batteries, composing music, building a garbage sorter, painting, producing plays, or creating a robotic dinosaur? The author weaves a theory around all of this practice, not in formal terms but rather through Socratic dialog, which tries to account for the most important aspects of learning. I doubt that it would satisfy most academics, but it doesn’t seem to have such aspirations. Nevertheless, if the implications of its many original ideas are through to their logical end, for example in the teaching of foreign languages, its practical consequences could be enormous. This is without a doubt one of the most intriguing books I have read in the past years.

[Eli · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is very interesting, and particularly stimulating and thought-provoking. The similarity between the title of Lanyi's book and the famous book by Sir Thomas More, as well as the close proximity of the literary devices employed by the two authors—random traveler's tale and the story frame of an isolated island where the action takes place—are certainly not accidental. Likewise, Lanyi’s goal is similar to that of the renowned English philosopher and politician: harsh criticism of the established system entrenched in the social order, with the aim to achieve a well-defined objective, contrasting it with an alternative system, devised by the author. Moore seeks to address the common forms of government in his time; Lanyi addresses education and educational institutions of today.

I am not professionally engaged in education and I am not an expert in it. Therefore I cannot express a professional opinion regarding Lanyi’s thesis. Furthermore, superficially speaking, it seems possible to raise objections with regard to reliance on the native fluency theory and its realization through the studios. At the macro level, such an approach leaves behind a whiff of elitism, making obvious that not everyone will be able, for various reasons, to rely on it and obtain what it can presumably offer. At the micro level, one may wonder whether, among other things, the loss of systematic and organized structure of traditional education, and its substitution with reliance on the absorption and internalization based on random exposure, is not inherently problematic in the very complex areas of natural sciences, engineering, and even domains that require an orderly conceptual infrastructure, such as law.

These are, however, issues that should be dealt with by experts. It seems that Lanyi’s aim is not to convince us of the correctness of his theory, but something much more modest. He wants to put an extremely important issue on the agenda, for everyone has to confront it. Some of us, if not most of us, are not happy with the existing education system and its products. Lanyi suggests a radically different method, and his approach is rooted in his biography. A fascinating suggestion, but is it fundamentally correct and especially is it feasible in our everyday reality? It is certainly worth a thought experiment, in the style of the many that the book is peppered with.

[Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not quite sure whether to treat this book as a work of fiction, of science fiction, or of non-fiction. It certainly has elements of all of these. At the bottom of it there is the fictional story of the main character landing unexpectedly on the fictional island of Uscolia, where everything is different from what we know, although people seem to be speaking English (though not only – there is a mixture of people), and many of their customs are similar to ours. But again, not all. The one area in which they differ most is education. When the visitor to Uscolia walks into an educational facility on the island, which they call a “studio,” he really looks and acts like Gulliver in the strange lands he visits. Here we are already in the sci-fi part of the book, as it is very unlikely that anything like the studios described will ever exist anywhere on earth. Finally, there is a non-fictional aspect of the book. Although it doesn’t cite any concrete studies, it discusses a whole range of theoretical issues related to teaching and learning, to how the brain acquires knowledge by collecting observations, and to how it memorizes things. Much of it is commonsense, but the way it is all put together it seems to amount to a theory of sorts. And much of it is based on how we learn our native language, which obviously all of us do, from which the author derives a theory of native fluency. An important message of the book is that it is possible to acquire native fluency not only in your mother tongue but in other areas as well. In this respect, the book takes on the aspect of a practical guide.
I suppose I would have preferred if the book was clearly one thing or another – fiction or non-fiction. But it is not proper fiction because there is no plot properly speaking. On the other hand, it is neither proper non-fiction, because most of the characters are fictional. I guess a utopia is by definition a mixture of the two.

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A breath of fresh air

Uscolia Review


Uscholia is a work that is rarely seen these days, a foray into a subject, a setting and a style that are almost instantly classical. Uscolia, the no-school of the title, takes place against the backdrop of modern life but also against modern life, not the least by its deep and effortless culture. Readers of More’s Utopia, Rousseau’s Emile or Plato’s Republic will find themselves at home in the open air of honest inquiry and fellowship. That the protagonist Ben should come upon the isle of direct learning by way of a runaway wind-surfboard is a taste of the kind of transport that awaits.


The thesis worked out through dialogue and over tea and refreshments is this: that children learn by doing and what they learn is what they understand. Nothing can be further from this refreshing vision of education than modern-day MOOCs, those factories of vendor-training and future sexters on an industrial scale. In Mr. Lanyi’s view, all learning is individual and experiential and, by logical conclusion, all knowledge is deep, productive and creative understanding. One emblematic portrait is the story of Puccini’s one-man re-enactment of Verdi’s Aida for the benefit of his small-town neighbors, after just one viewing. Uscolia is a treasure of such gems.


Mr. Lanyi’s efforts have always tended towards the classical and lightly-worn erudition. His previous work include illustrated myth and Bible stories for young children. I hope this step towards the adult reader is followed by more such instructive delights as Uscolia.

[Majanka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book Review originally published here: http://www.iheartreading.net/reviews/...



Uscolia is an interesting book. It offers a proposition: that we do not learn through education, or teaching (instructor conveying knowledge to a student), but that learning is, in fact, internal – it beings and ends inside the brain. The theory is based on native fluency, as we have with our own native language, which we do not learn through education but rather through being exposed to it.

This theory is explored through the story at hand – Ben, the protagonist, stumbles upon the island of Uscolia. This island has no schools. Instead, children acquire fluency in various disciplines like music, math and sciences not through education but simply through exposure, and are then allowed to pursue what interests them. There are no curricula people need to follow, and all projects are taught through self-learning, which seems to work rather well.

The book was quite helpful to me, and I imagine it will be equally helpful to others. I’ve always felt our education system is lacking, and simply learning through immersion, self-learning or aided self-learning, might be a better alternative than the regular education system.

[Brian Borgford · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Utopia"

This book was obviously inspired by Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia”. Well developed thoughts on how people acquire knowledge, skills and abilities. Not for everyone, but those who like to engage in vigorous philosophical discussions will likely be enthused.

I struggled with this book. It captured my attention immediately and began in a manner reminiscent of Gulliver’s Travels. But then it moved in a totally different direction with a major philosophical discussion of education. Although written in story fashion, it continued like a master’s thesis, absent research and objective evidence.

The book is well written and the author is obviously very well read and knowledgeable in all areas discussed. The objective of the book seems to be to make people think. The concepts presented of learning and education are interesting and thought provoking, but without research and evidence, it is just an interesting philosophical discussion. I can see some people jumping on board and say, “Yes, this is the way it should be”, while I can envisage others saying, “This is just a bunch of Hooey.”

The ending was quite abrupt, with no tie into the start of the story and it left me a bit flat.

[J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Uscolia is a modest size island off the coast of Washington about 170 miles away from Seattle and Vancouver. Rather that following the traditional classroom setting with teachers, the education is a cross between home schooling, apprenticeship, and exposure to new experience. The method is intended to balance learning between nurture and nature. In one case, it offers limitless opportunities for learning. In other cases, the learning is limited because you cannot learn what you are not exposed to. Much of the learning comes down to what is needed for survival. Once the basic needs are satisfied, the flexibility of unstructured curiosity will support independent learning. The author does not support notes or sources to support his theories. Ways to implement these educational methods on a large scale are not provided. The discussion is interesting. The methods may be useful in rural areas with sparse population but are not practical for municipalities.

The author randomly chose me to receive this book free because I frequently review books within the genre. Although encouraged, I was under no obligation to write a review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

[Rick Yvanovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclosure: I was offered a free copy of this book by the author in return for an honest review. I bought the book anyway and didn't take the freebie, read it, and that has made all the difference.

Understanding, thats what this book brings. A tipping point to the patterns that were there but now can clearly be understood. If only time could be wound back and I had embraced far more a Uscolian way or even the Doman way that would have been a better path.

We can only ask that the author Gabriel Lanyi writes more and shares more of the Uscolian way.

Whilst reading this book the style and cadence of the writing made me recall the author Eliyahu Goldratt who has written many books around process improvement, literally all of which I have read as I find it a fascinating and absorbing as Gabriel Lanyi. I can imagine an incredible conversation between the two, now that would be another story to write about.

Anyway, Uscolia is a fascinating and absorbing read which I am sure will grab you and you'll likely find it very hard not to be transported to Uscolia in your mind.

[Cecilia Harel · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the tradition of modern storytellers like Paulo Colhoe and Ann Patchett, Lanyi weaves a tale that leads us on a journey of discovery to the studios of Uscolia where learning takes place without "teaching." In easy to comprehend terms and with pertinent examples, Lanyi offers his analysis of how learning occurs, accompanied by a personal testimony of the application of these principles with his own child. Those interested in finding alternatives to current educational theory and practice will find here a refreshing and liberating outlook on how to promote and nurture children’s intellectual development and skills. Lanyi’s book is a valuable read for parents, educators, administrators, psychologists, and anyone else concerned with child development and learning.

[Charles Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but a youngster can learn almost anything. In fact, according to Gabriel Lanyi’s Uscolia, you can’t really teach anything because all real learning takes place internally in the brain.
An account of a fascinating journey to the island of Uscolia, where there are no schools, yet children of all ages display amazing linguistic, mathematical, and musical acumen. Lanyi shows, though a narrative that sounds fictional, that the way people truly learn anything is the same way children develop native fluency in their mother tongue, by absorbing, repeating, and making sense internally of their experiences.
This is an interesting read, and useful for anyone who wonders why our school systems consistently fail the way they do.