The First lesson: Learning How to Learn
“. . .we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.”
-Frank Herbert, Dune
This quote from the well-known science fiction novel Dune underlines the difficulty anyone in the corporate university, education, or training arena has to face. Very few of us have ever learned to learn and most of us live in fear of learning. This fear has roots in embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of ridicule, our society’s worship of “book” learning over experiential learning, and many other fears.
Children have the wonderful gift of total trust that they can, through interaction with their environment, learn. They experiment, test, challenge and in the process learn. Their natural curiosity and excitement over piecing together the world as they discover it is a wonderful thing to witness. Yet, somehow as we go through our formal schooling that innate belief in our own ability to learn, and most of our curiosity, is taken out of us.
Our organizations reflect us as well. Only a few are true learning organizations – ones that can invent the future and do so regularly. One that comes to mind is Apple. It remains youthful and exciting, even now that it is into middle age. It has programmed into itself the ability to take risks, be bold, and go where others are afraid to go.
Ikea also, as well as Starbucks and a handful of other organizations have developed the skills and trust to perpetually learn.
What the organizational development professionals and corporate university experts need to do is to better understand how they do this. I don’t think we have a very good understanding of how to teach a person (or an organization) to learn – which is, as Herbert says, the first lesson of all.
1 Comments:
I think in the corporate training world a great emphasis is placed on teaching in the context of the transference of knowledge such that the student or employee "knows" the information.
Corporate Universities shift from knowing to doing. It is one thing to know the components of the golf swing and entirely another thing to be able to execute the golf swing.
Learning to learn involves much more of a experiencial knowledge transfer that comes from more activity or doing based learning. The engraining of the learning to learn skill is rooted in action and the trial and error process. This is achieved through a different set of adult learning theory than is typically taught in classrooms, which is how most of us base our ability to learn experience. That model is not as ideally suited to learning the "learning to learn skill". If it were we would all be doing a much better job at the task.
Key in the process is overcoming the fear of failure. In my experience the deeply engrained shame associated socially with "failing" is so strong that most do not associate attempts to learn which do not generate the desired result initially with sucess. The student therefore stops attempting to learn. People are able to learn, but not if they fail to attempt.
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