ABSTRACT

The ancient Greek philosophers believed that education produces good or moral behavior. Aristotle divided education into two domains: reason and habit. The former involves understanding “the causes of things” while the latter derives from his belief that “anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it.” This division continues to today. Students need to learn facts and theories, to have and organize experience (Bagley 1907), while repetition of certain actions helps convert them to muscle-memory, allowing higher-order thinking to guide their use. Donald Schön, one of architecture’s most important educational theorists, emphasizes the role of the studio mentor as a live model for the “re ective practitioner” (Schön 1990) who demonstrates both execution skill and contextual understanding. This model recognizes that education may ow from either theoretical or practical wellsprings, reinforced by explanation and re ection in the case of theory, and by repeated practice in the case of the practical. In the process of teaching someone, we equip him or her with conceptual and sometimes physical tools and skills with which they understand the world and address its problems.