We Grow in Good Company
- Kelly Herron
- Jun 18
- 8 min read
A university and a regional education agency were gathering educators around a question they had named Reclaiming Human Learning in a Post-Knowledge World. A Community of Inquiry, they called the gathering.
That phrase stuck with me — post-knowledge — as if facts have become so common, so instantly available, that the real question of learning has quietly moved somewhere else. And maybe it has.
There has never been a better time to get your hands on information. You can take a course from a university you will never set foot in. You can watch a recorded lecture at midnight in your pajamas. You can ask AI to explain something you have wondered about for years, and it will, patiently, as many times as you need. The doors are wide open.
And that is worth celebrating — especially for people who were shut out of traditional education by cost, geography, time, or the plain circumstances of a life. Access is a justice issue, and more access is a good thing. But here is the question I cannot stop turning over — the one I suspect those educators are circling too:
We keep saying all of this makes learning more accessible. Does it?
Or does it make content more accessible — and are we quietly treating those as the same thing?
First, What Do We Even Mean by "Learning"?
This is where it matters to get specific, because two people can use the same word and mean completely different things. One definition says learning is coverage. Did the material get delivered? Did you sit through the module, finish the course, pass the quiz at the end? If yes — learning happened. Check the box.
My definition is different. To me, you have learned something when you can still do it after the teacher is gone and the screen is closed. When you can take it somewhere new, apply it to a problem nobody handed you, and get the outcome again on your own. That is not coverage. That is transfer — and it is a much higher bar.
I learned to paint a wall in a single afternoon, working alongside my Grandpa Leo. He worked wood from the time he was seventeen until he was seventy — and then kept at it after that, because his hands did not know how to quit. That one day, Grandpa Leo taught me eggshell white. How to mix the paint. How to lay it on so the wall went even and clean.
Forty-some years later, I still do it exactly the way he showed me. I also took four years of Spanish. Most of it is gone. A few words drift back now and then — but nothing like the paint. Nothing like that afternoon with Grandpa Leo.
One was coverage.
The other was company.
Researchers have language for this gap. They distinguish deep learning — critically examining new ideas and connecting them to what you already know — from surface learning, the uncritical acceptance of facts long enough to pass a test. They have also shown, again and again, that performing well during a lesson is not the same as still having the learning later. The quiz you ace on Friday says shockingly little about what you will carry into next year. So when we celebrate "accessible learning," we have to ask: accessible to which definition? Because we have made coverage almost infinitely available.
Transfer is a different animal. And transfer has never come from content alone.
Coaching question: Think about something you truly know how to do. Could you still do it if every course and video disappeared tomorrow — and where did that durability actually come from?
What the Research Shows
If you have worked in learning and development, you know the 70-20-10 model — the old rule of thumb that roughly 70% of what we learn comes from experience, 20% from other people, and 10% from formal instruction.
It came out of Center for Creative Leadership research in the 1990s, and it has been fairly criticized. The numbers were self-reported and were never meant as a precise recipe. But you do not have to defend the exact percentages to see what is underneath them. The model points toward something we already know in our bones: durable learning needs more than exposure. It needs experience. It needs reflection. It needs other people. Harder evidence points in the same direction.
In 2014, Scott Freeman and colleagues published a meta-analysis in PNAS of 225 studies comparing traditional lecturing to active learning in college science and math. Students in straight-lecture courses were 1.5 times more likely to fail. And the gains from active learning showed up most on concept inventories — the tests of genuine understanding, not memorization.
When the learning required doing rather than just receiving, people understood more and failed less. Experience, trying it out, is not a nice-to-have. It is where the understanding lives. Then there is the part that should change how we talk about online learning entirely. The most-researched model of online education is the Community of Inquiry framework, developed by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer in 2000. It found that meaningful online learning depends on three things working together: cognitive presence, teaching presence, and social presence — the felt sense of other real people in the room with you.
In that research, the instructor's presence and engagement turned out to be one of the strongest predictors of whether online learning actually worked. Sit with what that means. The learning problem is not the screen. An online course rich with connection can produce deep learning. A course — online or in a packed lecture hall — stripped of interaction can produce surface learning.
The variable that mattered was never only the medium. It was the company.
Coaching question: Where in your own learning are you mistaking coverage for understanding — finishing the content but never putting it into practice, conversation, or relationship?
What It Means to Be Human
That word — company — is worth holding onto.
Because keeping company is not only how we learn best. It is close to the heart of what makes us human in the first place. We are built to be with each other, and the learning follows the belonging.
When I think about what it means to be human, I do not think first about credentials. I think about creating. Shaping. Connecting. I think about the way we build things together — families, friendships, neighborhoods, organizations — and how we become ourselves inside those relationships. Being human is doing life with other people. It is sitting beside someone who knows more than you and watching how they think. It is the apprenticeship. The job shadow. The conversation where someone sees you try, stumble, and does not look away. It is the mentor who does not hand you the answer but walks alongside you while you find your own. That is where the deepest learning has always lived — not in content alone, but in community. The research is not telling us something new. It is confirming something ancient.
The Stakes — Why This Is Urgent Now
Here is why this is not just an interesting debate about course design or the medium. If deep learning requires relationship, then loneliness is not only a social problem. It is a learning problem.
We are building a world with less and less of the very thing deep learning requires. In June 2025, the World Health Organization's Commission on Social Connection reported that one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness. The American Psychological Association's 2025 survey found more than half of U.S. adults feel isolated or lacking companionship. Researchers at Arizona State University found loneliness rising among middle-aged Americans compared to earlier generations — a pattern that looks unique to the United States.
This is not, on its own, a story about test scores. It is a story about conditions. We are pulling apart the relationships, mentorships, third places, and rooms, even virtual ones, where people used to learn each other's names — and then handing everyone access to knowledge and calling it learning.
And there is a quieter cost showing up in classrooms, workplaces, and online spaces right now. When learning becomes pure transmission — content in, answer out — the muscles that make us human learners start to soften. Metacognition, the practice of thinking about our own thinking. Critical thinking. Discernment. The willingness to sit in a hard question instead of reaching for the fastest answer. Those do not develop in isolation. They develop in dialogue, in friction, in practice, and in the company of someone who pushes back with care - whether they are connecting with us virtually or in-person. When we lose community, we do not just get lonely. We lose one of our primary classrooms.
Both, Not Either
Now, let me be careful, because this is not an argument against being alone. We all need solitude — time to think, reflect, take something in on our own terms, and let the learning settle.
The research agrees. A study in Nature Scientific Reports found that time alone can lower stress and build a sense of autonomy — but only when that solitude is chosen rather than imposed. Researchers at Oregon State University found that gentler forms of solitude — reading at a café, thinking on a walk — can restore us better than deep isolation. Chosen solitude feeds us. Deepens our learning through reflection. Imposed isolation starves us. The difference is everything.
So the real question was never community or alone time for learning. It is how we build both intentionally, in a rhythm that fits who we are. We need the quiet work of reflection and the relational work of growing alongside others. We need space to listen inward and people who help us hear what we cannot hear alone. That is the social aspect of learning.
Coaching question: What is your natural rhythm between solitude and connection — and are you honoring it on purpose, or just defaulting to whatever is easiest?
Learning Continuously Is a Way of Being
Here is what I believe: Learning continuously does not mean consuming more content. It does not mean another course, another certificate, another degree checked off the list, or studying alone late into the night. It means staying curious. Staying in relationship. Being intentional about how you grow — and with whom. It means choosing, ahead of time, to be the kind of person who learns in the open. To be the person who says, "I wonder what would happen if..." to the person you are meeting with online or sitting next to in a room. The kind of person who asks for help. Who invites someone in. Who makes room for someone else to try. Who balances the quiet of reflection with the courage of connection.
The information will always be there now, glowing on a screen, available at midnight. Isn't that access amazing? That is the gift of this moment, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the learning that actually transfers — the kind you still own when the course is over — still happens the way it always has.
In the doing.
In the reflecting.
And in good company.
So who are you going to learn with this week?
Sources & Further Reading
• Freeman, S., et al. (2014). Active Learning Increases Student Performance in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics. PNAS, 111(23).
• Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). The Community of Inquiry framework — social, cognitive, and teaching presence in online learning.
• The 70-20-10 model — overview — and ATD, "Where Is the Evidence?" on its limits.
• Weinstein, N., et al. (2023). The benefits and harms of everyday solitude. Nature Scientific Reports.
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