Learner-Driven Learning
also Active learning
The principle that the learner is the active agent who creates and tests their own knowledge, always doing most of the work, while teachers play only a secondary role.
Learner-driven learning holds that the person doing the learning is the active party who must create and test the knowledge for themselves. Knowledge cannot be poured into a mind the way water is poured into a bucket; the learner always does most of the work, and teachers, books, and experiences play only a smaller, secondary role.
The view follows directly from Popper’s rejection of the bucket theory of mind, which casts learners as passive vessels that absorb knowledge from teachers or from the senses. Against this, CR offers the searchlight picture: minds actively choose where to point their attention, guided by ideas they already hold, rather than soaking up everything around them. Because all learning proceeds by conjectures and refutations — guessing and then criticizing the guesses — the learner must do the guessing and error-correction internally. Words from a teacher or book do not transfer meaning directly; the learner has to interpret them, work out what they mean, and figure out how to use them. So learning is never the passive receipt of justified content.
CF accepts this as fundamental. It means good teaching supplies tips, points out common mistakes, and makes ideas easier to guess, but it cannot substitute for the learner’s own work. The principle shapes CF’s practical advice on study: making piecemeal improvements to existing knowledge and cycling between topics both presuppose an active learner steering their own error correction rather than waiting to be filled up.