There are fundamental differences in the forms of learning addressed by cognitive psychologists and educationalists. The phenomena explained by a psychological theory of learning are the successes of human cognition. The mechanisms posited are designed to account for how learning takes place, where the content of the learning is the physical and social world around us. Educational theories of learning usually concern students' failure to learn. The content of the learning that is supposed to take place is a different kind of world: the world of other people's ideas. Psychological theories of why people fail to learn an idea do not provide adequate explanation because of a key difference: the content in this case is not the "natural" environment of the real world to which the learner has immediate access but the world of academic ideas, an "unnatural" environment. The same cognitive capacities that work well in the natural environment do not in the unnatural environment. In education, students fail to learn at least partly because the environment does not afford learning. Instead of providing study skill courses, educators need to enrich students' means of access to the unnatural world of academic ideas. An 18-item reference list is included. (DB)