We have all learned through instruction, when being taught our first words by our parents, how to say ‘hello’ or ‘thank you’, how to sit ourselves in a chair or on our haunches, how to hold a fork or a pair of chopsticks to eat, how to brush our teeth, wash ourselves, and so on. Later, as we grow older, we may be instructed how to ride a bicycle or how to drive a car.
All this learning involves the all-too-familiar trial and error process, we are shown how to do it, try it out, get corrected as necessary, try it out again, practice, and slowly get the hang of it. We end up learning how to perceive and do things.
But we are also familiar with another type of instruction, sitting in a room with our peers, listening to a teacher, watching their writing on a board, or their show and tell. On the face of it, it looks passive, the teacher instructs, the pupils listen and watch. But, especially when we were younger, the teacher would ask us to repeat, recite, sometimes in unison, sometimes one-by-one, would conduct regular drills with multiplication tables, ask us to go to the board and write words out, or do it at our desks, frequently give us exercises in class. We would take homework at home, to practice with the material we covered in class. We would write short compositions, write out answers to questions, write essays on topics. And when studying alone, we would frequently repeat out loudly to memorize what we wanted to learn. Even when we would try to repeat in silence, our lips usually would move. And we would check, a friend or our parents would check, and the teacher would check as well, whether our trials demonstrated that we had learned or not.
We sometimes tend to focus and remember the passive aspect of that classroom instruction, of just sitting in class, and we forget the extensive trial and error activities that went on behind the scenes.
Ok, the intellectual skills are not innate properties of mind. Experiences and social settings must be taken into account. But where is the person? What remains stable in different settings? Is there any kind of “skill or knowledge transfer”? If not, then what the hell are we doing in schools?
The person is in the body, which is what moves from setting to setting. This body would be the carrier of the stability you are asking for, along with any stability in the structure of the settings. And what you call “intellectual skills” will be manifested (demonstrated perhaps sometimes) through the performance of the body. What you are referring to as “person” emerges, is realized, is understood in the same bodily performance – by the outsiders, as well as by the person. And of course this personhood differs according to socialization and may differ radically across cultures.
Of course there is plenty of “skill transfer”. This is how cultures are propagated and social structures and relations are reproduced. One of the goals of instruction is the production of bodies that carry the skills necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of society. This entails certain coordination among the skills transferred (for example, different skills for boys and girls) and also a certain uniformity (language, sense of history, sense of citizenship, religion, morality, etc). A big part of this transfer clearly takes place in schools.