Learning and Education

Education is the accumulation of facts. This is what we go to school for. We are “taught” facts: scientific facts, other people’s experiences, theories and so on. We are expected to memorise what we have been guided to know so we can pass examinations. This is school.

The next level of this, perhaps at postgraduate level, is when we must apply the facts to real life situations. We must test their validity and, if we are smart enough, improve those fact. Even smarter still, discard those facts as we develop better versions of them.

Learning is not necessarily incorporated into education that well. Most of us take it for granted that learning takes place during formal education. It is often informally occurring and is often unguided and undocumented. It is possible, though, to model learning since we can explain what it is.

Learning is the extraction of lessons from experiences. It involves experience/s, realisation and building in the realisation into practices, habits and processes.

Building in realisations means any one of three things: avoiding what is negative and averse, reinforcing what is positive and valuable or improving what is positive and valuable.