You make a couple of good points. Adults are not good formal learners,
for the reasons you mention. Dare I say this to a psych? - arr, why not?
- I reckon much of this is due to resentment of a 'back to childhood'
sensation - re-visiting all of that powerlessness you thought you had
left so far behind. Be that as it may, self-administered learning (via
the distance education format programs you ponder) is a powerful tool
for what we in this forum are on about. I will be sending a longer
submission on this in response to Neil's challenge to re-visit our
learning paradigms.
The reason I jump in now is that you have reminded of the 'discomfort'
factor that will accompany adult learning. In many fields, that might be
intolerable. (The only one I can think of straight off is accountancy,
but I'm sure there are many.) On the other hand, in learning the
business of aviation (and all of it, not just flying the planes), there
is discomfort aplenty. (See PS) As a pilot, I can recall several. At the
head of my list is learning to cope with the reality of being in the
middle of a thunderstorm at midnight after an 18 hour duty day.
Aviation practitioners do need to be able to learn (and function) under
stress. However, that ought to be a deliberate training strategy, not
something incidental. So, on the one hand, a learning provider could
argue that the stress being imposed by the classroom environment is a
sound replication of an operational reality. The truth is that the
learning influences should be those that enable transfer (with
certainty) of the objectives of the training, with the utmost
efficiency. And I'm with you there. I don't think classrooms and
lectures are up to that. I'll talk later about another way.
Cheers
Doug
PS Seeing as how you are in La Belle France, you may be able to find
frank acknowledgement of the interdependency between pilot and external
support, by getting hold of some of Antoine de St Exupery's wondrous
yarns, eg, 'Night Flight', 'Courrier Sud' and 'Wind, Sand, and Stars.
(Don't bother with St Ex's 'Le Petit Prince', though. He may have been a
great aviator - and he was, and he did die honourably 'on the line' -
but I think he could have puffed the weed a tad beyond sensibility in
writing 'The Little Prince'. Mind you, if you compare Dick Bach's
'Stranger to the Ground', with his later 'Jonathon Livingstone Seagull',
you could well discover similar psychic influences. Whatever. Good luck
to both of them. We owe them heaps.)