We all agree that learning is really important, but it might not be done and represented in the best form during lectures in our schools. That is why we see children happily engaged playing different computer games and spend a lot of time on them and usually not care that much about learning and doing their homework. Some of the reasons why children aren’t learning is because they aren’t properly educated and informed about the value that it has, and also because of the way used to treat learning.
Doris Lessing in her book The Golden Notebook has a great passage that we should keep in mind:
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgments. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.
A graduate student working for his PhD in Physics while trying to do a trick with his skateboard outside the Physics lab, had a great insight about learning and he gave a TED talk about this, which you can watch below. I would like to take three points from his talk about the lessons that we all can get from his skateboarding experience.
Failure is normal
A lot of students might think that just because they couldn’t pass an exam, they are doomed to not get a certain degree, and they may start thinking that it’s because they aren’t intelligent enough to pass the exam. But, as Dr. Tae shows us in the video by taking his entertaining session that he did on 31 of October, 1999 as an example when he failed 57 times until he properly did the trick with his skateboard. Even the so-considered chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin mentions in his book The Art of Learning that he used to learn a lot of things when he lost a match. But keep it in mind that failure will not be helpful if you aren’t using it as a mirror of your weaknesses.
Nobody knows ahead of time how long it takes anyone to learn anything
Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers mentions that 10,000 hours are needed to achieve mastery at any field and this has been mentioned, but if you will keep working for 10,000 hours only on things that you know and you are good at, you will not be an expert on that particular field. You should also try to address your weaknesses and work on them deliberately, and you may end up being an expert even without such amount of time spent practicing. Josh Kaufman has written a book about this and also the author of three #1 New York Times/Wall Street Journal bestsellers, Tim Ferriss learned the traditional Japanese archery, Yabusame in five days, which usually takes years to learn, and it should serve as a means of breaking the myth of what is possible.
Real-time meaningful feedback
When you fail, the best thing to do is to get immediate feedback, reflect and learn from it, because this will help you overcome the same obstacle next time you face it. Dr. Tae gets real-time feedback from his drops and will know when he did the trick right. And Scott Young, who managed to finish the 4-year MIT Computer Science Curriculum in just a year on his own mentions this as a very useful tip to learn.
The same events might be looked different for different people, but only those who interpret them in empowering forms benefit the most from them.
