Learning

I like it when people figure things out on their own.

It was one of the reasons I enjoyed teaching for the near entirety of my career.

Now, just telling people things can be useful and is certainly a part of the educational process, but there's often a lot of resistance and cognitive dissonance to overcome. It's the old adage, "If you don't know you don't know, you think you know."

I find real learning is in the discovery and the understanding that ignorance is just temporary, whereas people often wear misinformation as a badge of pride in "not knowing." 

Anyway, when someone gets it, whatever IT is, they've taken a step forward. And even though we might want to yell that we told them that a dozen times before, that's just our own ego wanting credit. 

When someone actually learns a new fact, a new truth, a new way of seeing things, that becomes part of them and more importantly, they become more open to learning and even open to replacing the incorrect and/or outdated information they have hung onto for so long.

We've made it very difficult for people to learn. First, we've incorrectly encouraged kids to think that knowing things is good and not knowing is bad. You're smart or you're dumb. 

For most people it is a label we carry around most of our lives. We're afraid others will find out just how much we don't know. We self denigrate ourselves as a way of preemptively lowering any expectations that we're smart and might have to prove it.

We elevate IQ scores and SAT results as a way of separating the wheat from the chaff. 

If we ever redefine learning as the process of seeking knowledge and understanding and all the tools required to accomplish this, then we can move away from the antiquated habit of rewarding right answers as the principle measure of intelligence.

Knowing is a stagnant state of intelligence. Seeking understanding and processing and synthesizing information to reach valid conclusions is much more challenging and significant form of active intelligence.