How people learn...

There are only three ways in which human beings learn. They learn from experience and have been doing so since the emergence of the very first human beings. They learn by interaction with people who are wiser and more knowledgeable than they—teachers, rabbis, shamans, etc.—and have been doing so since human beings first started to communicate in words. Lastly but by no means least, they learn from interaction with the human record—those aggregations of texts, images, and symbols that are the collective memory of humankind.

--Michael Gorman