I’m often bemused to read how important it is that children “learn how to learn.” It seems to be the phrase du jour among self-described progressive educators, book authors, school critics, and those who promote ever-earlier attendance at pre-school institutions. Some young children might be able to be trained – in dog-like fashion – to sit still, listen, memorize and regurgitate. Aside from the criminality of taking their childhood away from them, that training has nothing to do with teaching them how to learn. It would be more honest if we admitted that it’s a rationale for congregating kids in a supposedly safe place so their parents can do other things.
Children don’t need to be taught how to learn; they are born learners. As I wrote in my book Challenging Assumptions in Education, we come out of the womb interacting with and exploring our surroundings. Babies are active learners, their burning curiosity motivating them to learn how the world works. And if they are given a safe, supportive environment, they will continue to learn hungrily and naturally – in the manner and at the speed that suits them best. In fact, you cannot stop young children learning from everything they experience. They are always experimenting with cause and effect. And they are always soaking up information from their environment – learning to walk, talk and do many other amazing things.
Cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik, who is co-author of a research study called “The Scientist in the Crib,” says babies’ brains are smarter, faster, more flexible and busier than adults’. Her research has confirmed that, contrary to traditional beliefs about children, toddlers think in a logical manner, arriving at abstract principles early and quickly. “They think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations and even do experiments,” she writes.
The late Robert White, Harvard developmental psychologist, called this instinct to learn an “urge toward competence.” What he meant was that we are born with the need to have an impact on our surroundings, to control the world in which we live. We do not just sit and wait for the world to come to us (unless we’ve been told to sit down, be quiet and wait). We actively try to interpret the world, to make sense of it. Of course, this drive to discover means we are constantly learning…and experiencing the pride that comes with having learned. And it doesn’t stop with walking and talking; it continues naturally as children learn to read, write, do what we call math, science, geography, history and more.
If someone is enrolled in a school or a course and therefore required to study a specific topic with the end result of remembering the contents of the course, they will benefit from a variety of study strategies skills – tips for organizing and memorizing data, reading efficiency and research techniques, organizational habits, ways to bribe themselves to keep at it, and so on. At the end of the school year or the course, these tricks may help the person remember the material and score well on an exam. They may or may not remember the material past that time frame, be able to integrate it into their understanding of the world, and apply it to future situations. That is, they may or may not have learned something, although we use that terminology to describe the outcome. Ironically, these are the very skills children innately use from birth and that school steals from them at an ever younger age!
Learning has been described as an art form. And yes, it might well be that. But we’re born with the necessary talent. To think that a child needs to be taught how to learn is an example of ubiquitous adult arrogance. Children need time, space, love, trust and respect so they can develop their art. And then, perhaps, the adults in their world might do well to sit back and watch them at work…and unearth the talent that their own childhoods buried.