Learning new principles from precedents and exercises

摘要

Much learning is done by way of studying precedents and exercises. A teacher supplies a story, gives a problem, and expects a student both to solve a problem and to discover a principle. The student must find the correspondence between the story and the problem, apply the knowledge in the story to solve the problem, generalize to form a principle, and index the principle so that it can be retrieved when appropriate. This sort of learning pervades Management, Political Science, Economics, Law, and Medicine as well as the development of common-sense knowledge about life in general.