No one ever shows us how to learn

Falsifiable Friday #9

Happy Friday 😀

Meta-learning is knowing how to learn. It is one of the most important skills to learn, yet few people know how to do to it.

We take this is for granted, but how to do this is far from obvious and doesn’t get taught in the curriculum.

As Adam Robinson observed on the Farnam Street podcast:

“No one ever shows us how to learn, ever. Nowhere in school. For example, imagine, Shane, [Shane is the host of the FS podcast] in French class, French 101, your first French class, your teacher said, “Everyone, you’re going to have to learn a lot of vocabulary in this class so before I teach you any words I’m going to teach you a way to remember vocabulary.” They never do that. They just go, “We’re going to have a quiz on these 30 words on Monday. Good luck.” But they don’t teach us how to learn actually, or remember things.”

This is weird, because, in today’s high-information world, people need the ability to make sense of complexity and to combine many bits of data into a broad picture of the world.

Indeed, I suspect that learning is a misunderstood concept, current designs for information transfer such as books are ineffective and we should teach students way better knowledge management skills.

So one of the things I’d like to work on it to empower people to learn. So that they can do better sensemaking, experience the joy of understanding and have a more meaningful live.

Here’s a first step.

Cheers,

Maarten