In many martial arts there is the concept of 3 stages of learning that are roughly[1]:
1) Learn a bunch of rules and follow them by rote
2) Learn when to break the rules
3) Learn to make your own rules
Looking up the Dreyfus model of skill development mentioned in the article, there is a similar concept.
In martial arts, teaching at level #1 is easy; if person A knows a rule that person B doesn't, then person B can teach it to person A. Similarly one person can teach a large class of people a rule all at once. If you ever had a friend as a kid do a year of e.g. Karate and say "Grab my wrist... No, not that way, this way..." you've seen it taught at that level.
In martial arts, at least, learning above level 1 isn't really something that scales, nor is it something that will easily happen without a lot of self-motivation from the learner. There are, however, some traditions that are successful in aiding someone in the transition in a sort of mentorship relationship.
Such traditions aren't peculiar to martial arts though, as most crafts have ways of doing it. It would be interesting to know if modern behavioral sciences have found improvements, as the development of such traditions has always been ad-hoc informal and more of "this is how my mentor did it" rather than "we have good reason to think this way is best"
1: Here's an article on wikipedia about it; the martial-art I learned about this was not Japanese, nor Chinese, so it was somewhat different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuhari
1) Learn a bunch of rules and follow them by rote
2) Learn when to break the rules
3) Learn to make your own rules
Looking up the Dreyfus model of skill development mentioned in the article, there is a similar concept.
In martial arts, teaching at level #1 is easy; if person A knows a rule that person B doesn't, then person B can teach it to person A. Similarly one person can teach a large class of people a rule all at once. If you ever had a friend as a kid do a year of e.g. Karate and say "Grab my wrist... No, not that way, this way..." you've seen it taught at that level.
In martial arts, at least, learning above level 1 isn't really something that scales, nor is it something that will easily happen without a lot of self-motivation from the learner. There are, however, some traditions that are successful in aiding someone in the transition in a sort of mentorship relationship.
Such traditions aren't peculiar to martial arts though, as most crafts have ways of doing it. It would be interesting to know if modern behavioral sciences have found improvements, as the development of such traditions has always been ad-hoc informal and more of "this is how my mentor did it" rather than "we have good reason to think this way is best"
1: Here's an article on wikipedia about it; the martial-art I learned about this was not Japanese, nor Chinese, so it was somewhat different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuhari