Bread and the Future of Learning

I have been watching a great documentary on Netflix called Cooking. It has nothing to do with training or education. On the weekend I was watching the third episode on Air which introduced bread making. There has been a common theme running through all of the episodes that essentially states that due to the decreased amount of home cooking and our growing use of takeaway food and highly processed food we have managed to increase obesity, cancer, heart attacks, diabetes etc. The part that I find very interesting about bread making is that the original form of bread making was done by using the sourdough method whereby the wheat and water naturally ferment over a few days and then the dough is baked to make bread. It appears that this natural fermentation process breaks down all of the minerals and other aspects of the wheat, especially the gluten and makes the finished bread more nutritional, easier to digest and has none of the gluten issues that some people are affected by. You can basically live off bread indefinitely. Awesome.

But what did we do to bread. We mass produced it. We added another 30 or so ingredients and we sped up the fermentation process by using yeast which accelerates the rise but doesn’t break the wheat down. In the process we have created bread that is cheap but nutritionally poor and also in some cases harmful. Bread is the number one staple across the world. Many rely on bread as their main form of sustenance. So, what has this got to do with learning.

I think we are doing to learning what we have done to bread. We’ve forgotten that this number one staple of people’s lives (learning) requires time, patience and fermentation. We are mass producing learning. We have made it fast and cheap but is it as nourishing? I am a fan of elearning and technology but what are we losing in the process. In Australia our whole focus (it seems) is on assessment regardless of how some one learnt something. Unfortunately like bread, one day we will turn around and examine what we have done and realise we have destroyed something that was natural and good for us all in the belief that we could do it better.