Learning for the 21st century

Introduction

The conventional way of looking at education and learning is that it is the thing that moves you over the finish line from being a kid to being an adult: kids learn, adults know.  Schools are the kiln kids need to be baked in for so many years till they come out as glazed pots, hardened into a particular function, while the ones that have cracked get tossed aside.

This notion of education, this notion of kid/adult, this notion of learning has been obsolete for a while.  As a society, we continue blithely on, occasionally patching up the old model - and we haven't yet built any compelling model for what should replace it and how.

The Foundation for Learning is exploring and developing a model for learning we call "learning for the 21^st century."  In this model, people learn from cradle to grave: we learn as naturally as we breathe - we stop learning when we stop breathing.  Much of this learning doesn't necessarily look like the education we get in school.  We learn to walk and talk without school, we learn most of our hobbies outside of school.  Yet schools have a hugely important role to play as an environment in which kids learn about the world, and learn to learn effectively.  To be a match for the world of the 21^st century, people will require a real facility for unlearning: for finding out that something they took for granted ain't necessarily so.  In this model then, learning goes way beyond accumulating of knowledge.  Learning will be more akin to appreciating - acquiring new eyes to see with.

Appreciating

What do you appreciate about your life?  What allows us to appreciate life?  What is appreciation?

The quality of our life is a function of how much we appreciate our life.  If we are starving, we appreciate having more food; if we are poor, we appreciate having more money.  Yet appreciation is not primarily a matter of the quantity of stuff.  Often, people appreciate less of something  - less garbage, less noise, less interruption, less junk mail, less hassle.  And mostly, appreciation has nothing to do with quantity at all.

There is not one way to appreciate.  As an example, let's look at chess.  Some people look at a chess game that's underway and see that one player has an extra horsy and the other an extra tower.  That gives them a particular kind of appreciation of that game.  Other people might look at that same game and see that White cannot keep Black from promoting the King's pawn.  And that gives them another level of appreciation of that game.  Yet another may see how nervous the player with the Black pieces is and how often he looks at the clock, and how much the White player seems to enjoy herself - and have a whole other kind of appreciation.

The Foundation for Learning puts appreciation right in the center of what learning is about.  Any process or activity or insight that has you appreciate something about your life in new and rich ways, is learning.  This includes the stuff that parents consider "practical" - learning the things that will get you a better job, learning to keep out of trouble, learning how to live within a budget.  It also includes the stuff parents tend to call "impractical" - how to get even better at your video game, how to "make it" in your peer group, how to survive high school.

Your appreciation of life does not have to come at the expense of my appreciation of life.  The fount of appreciation never runs dry.  If you teach me to appreciate the music of Bach - or the music of Frank Zappa - your appreciation of that music is not diminished.

The world of economics would look vastly different if it was widely held that life, richly appreciated, need not be a scarce commodity anywhere.

Breathing

Most of us learn to talk at a very young age, before any schools come into the picture.  By many measures, learning to talk is harder by far than anything we learn since.  At a very deep level, we are a species that learns.  Like cats, our rate of learning tends to decrease sharply as we get older.  Unlike cats, there is plenty of evidence that human beings can continue to learn and develop at a rapid clip till death.

Risking

All but the most trivial learning involves trial and error.  The worst obstacle we can put in the way of learning is an unacceptance of making "mistakes."  Yet we can see clearly in our schools that students have picked up somewhere along the way that saying something stupid, or not knowing the answer, is a bad thing to be avoided.

Environments conducive to learning are environments that are conducive to taking risk.  Learning entails risk  Your first dance steps may not look very graceful, your first drawing of a face may not look much like a face to your friends, your first attempt at playing a particular video game may result in your plane being shot out of the sky.  One of the primary goals of school is to provide an environment where the risk of learning, though real, is nevertheless managed.  Crashing a plane in a video game may be embarrassing, but it is harmless compared to crashing a real plane!

Unlearning

Humans can unlearn things.  There are situations in a person's life that call for a revision of what was held to be true.  Real learning happens when someone is willing to consider that "it ain't necessarily so."  The phenomenon of unlearning what were closely held "facts" and theories causes a sudden and far-reaching rearrangement of a person's relationship to the world.

For most people, the threshold for unlearning something is very high.  In a static world, unlearning is useless; in a fast-changing world, the capacity to unlearn is key.  Schools put very little emphasis on student's ability to unlearn.  For the Foundation for Learning, strengthening the capacity to unlearn is at the core of effective education.

As Edward de Bono pointed out, somebody who learns to type on his own with two fingers can get quite good and quite fast.  In fact, the better he is at two-finger typing, the less inclined he will be to bother to learn ten-finger typing.  And yet, faster and more accurate typing using ten fingers is available for all two-finger typists.  The facility and willingness to unlearn is what allows for Bateson's Level II learning and Level III learning.  It allows for a very rich and very deep and ever developing relationship with reality.

Learning to Learn

Learning always and forever takes place in a cultural context.  As an example, little boys in France grow up to be French-speaking Frenchmen, whereas little boys in America grow up to be English-speaking Americans.  This happens not because the little boy said "I'm going to be a Frenchman when I grow up!"  Nor because the curriculum in elementary school has special classes in how to be French.  French is simply what little boys in France are, yet this is entirely a cultural disposition and not a genetic one.  There are very many other things that kids learn that are undistinguished as learning.

We say that learning is not merely the accumulation of facts and theories over the course of a number of years in school.

The act of learning has us build new eyes and new vantage points from which to see.  There is no endpoint to this - and that is a good thing.  A kid who has learned how to learn - this is a kid who has had a successful education.

---

home

links

discussions