LEARNING TO LEARN?

Back in 1992 I wrote "Learning To Learn" an article that was published in "New Horizons for Learning" (https://implicity.org/learning.htm).

In the many years since I have come to realize we must qualify what we mean by 'learning to learn' because we don't have to teach children to learn.

As Jack Shonkoff (Neurons to Neighborhoods @ Harvard) says: "Children are born ready to learn. We don't have to make them ready to learn. We don't have to teach them how to learn. They are wired from the beginning to learn, and they're wired to experience and to master the world around them."

However, Dr. Shonkoff is referring to the natural modes of learning, not the artificial modes of learning that success in school and later life depends on. We do have to teach children how to learn ARTIFICIALLY and their lives depend on how well we do it.

Reading, writing, math, and all their abstract, conventional, and technological outgrowths, require our brains to process information in complexly artificial ways. Whereas we learn to move, feel, touch, smell, taste, hear, emote, walk, and talk by reference to the immediate internal feel of learning them, in the artificial domains we learn from the external, abstract, authority of who or what we are learning from. In natural modes of learning we learn from immediately synchronous (self-generated) feedback on the edge of participating (falling while walking). In the artificial modes, (other-provided) feedback can be way out of ‘sync’ with the learning it relates to (test results in school provide feedback far downstream from the learning they measure). Most of the children who struggle in school are struggling with artificial learning challenges.

This is important. Without differentiating these radically different modes of learning we create the conditions in which children grow up feeling ashamed of their minds. How that happens, how most of our kids grow up to various degrees feeling ashamed of their learning (for not being good enough at learning like a machine) is the bigger issue.

The issue isn't learning to learn. It's learning not to become learning disabled while learning to become artificially learning enabled.

Unhealthy Artificial Learning