Home For Fiction – Blog

“I grow old ever learning many things,” Solon said. Learning as you grow old is very rewarding, as well as essential for maintaining your well-being. But there is something more important than learning about science, history, the arts, or anything else. And that is learning how to learn.

But what does it mean, to learn how to learn? Moreover, how can one learn how to learn, and is this sort of learning accessible to everyone? Let’s try to unwrap this with a little personal story.

A relative of mine worked all her life behind a computer. That was in the 80s, long before graphic desktops, and there was significant complexity. If you wanted the computer to do something as simple as filling in a form or printing out a table, you had to enter a series of complex strings and commands. This relative of mine had mastered the entire system and performed efficiently and accurately.

And then she retired, and Windows came along. And it took her years to learn how to use the mouse, and only recently did she understand (sort of) how an Internet browser works. Concepts like “the cloud,” “signing in to Google to save YouTube videos you like,” or even “organize your bookmarks” are entirely alien to her.

Why is all this important? Because it’s a great example of how someone can be an excellent learner of any particular method, concept, or discipline, and yet a very poor learner of learning.

Learning a Lot of Things Is not the Same as Learning How To Learn

You can be great at learning about music. Perhaps you have learned how to play ten different instruments! This is surely a veritable achievement, but taking into consideration the bigger picture, how useful is it to you if you feel clueless about, say, computers?

Learning about a lot of things is not the same as learning how to learn. Someone might have attended a course on pottery, a course on chess, another on embroidery, and perhaps has read a book on using Photoshop. This is not (in itself) an example of someone who has learned how to learn.

So, what does learning how to learn really mean, then?

Someone who has learned how to learn is someone who approaches learning from a holistic perspective, and for whom learning is not disconnected from its context but, rather, a means to a particular end. Someone who has learned how to learn does not learn something “just because”, but with a particular, graspable goal in mind, the fulfillment of which depends on learning a particular set of methods.

And so, what perhaps most crucially separates someone who has learned how to learn and someone who hasn’t is their attitude toward context and interconnectivity of knowledge. In other words, someone who has learned how to learn can also flexibly make use of every learned discipline or method in connection to some other discipline or method.

For such a person, learning doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and knowledge becomes precisely what it’s supposed to be: a vast network of interconnected disciplines, all supporting each other.

How Can One Master Learning How To Learn?

Trying to teach one to learn how to learn is a bit like trying to teach them how to love. In other words, nobody can teach you that but your own desires, needs, and volition. At best, one could perhaps show you why you should learn how to learn, but that’s it.

However, just in the spirit of optimism, think of it like this: forget all grand ideas about learning, knowledge, betterment, blah blah, and just be selfish. Learn something because you want to and because you need to for a particular purpose.

“I’ll attend a poetry class because it would be a nice thing to do” is a ridiculous reason to do it, and a bad way to learn. But “I’ll learn how to code in JavaScript so that I can make my own genre-marking program” is a far more graspable and practical goal.

You begin knowing nothing. Actually no, that’s not right. You will always know something, even unconsciously. You might not know the syntax of an if-statement in Java, but if you know – even subconsciously – about logic, the concept of “IF this THEN DO that” or “IF this-but-not-this THEN DO that-and-that” is not hard to grasp. As I said earlier, learning how to learn is all about context, interconnectivity, and understanding knowledge as an infinite series of building blocks.

(Not) a Grumpy Old Man

That relative I was talking about earlier is almost 70 years old. She knows how to use the computer, in the sense that she can open the browser and visit Facebook, or read the news on a website. Does she know how to create a Google account to create playlists on YouTube? No, but that’s not the most pressing problem. The main issue is that she doesn’t want to learn. Instead, she prefers to bookmark separate YouTube videos, one after another, having created a long and unmanageable list of bookmarks, all pointing to individual YouTube videos.

Why doesn’t she want to learn? Frankly, I can’t understand it. To someone like me, who learned to play the piano just because I wanted to play this song, this attitude is tantamount to unconditional surrender.

In the end, this is another good reason to learn how to learn: so that you don’t end up being a grumpy old man/woman, who can’t understand how to operate a virtual-reality helper or interact with a household robot (just trying to keep the article relevant for the year 2060!)