Five Things about Learning

I was asked by a friend recently to state five things I have learned about learning. Here is what I came up with in the moment.

(1) You can't give someone knowledge, you can only put provide them with opportunities to create new knowledge for themselves and with others. To teach is to provide such opportunities and to help others make the most of them.

(2) We learn in a lot of different ways–playing, talking, listening, observing, doing, reflecting, reading, writing, collaborating, practicing, tinkering, just to name a few.

(3) Emotional engagement and social interaction are not only integral to learning but inseparable from thinking and knowing.

(4) The nature of expertise and naivety are deceivingly complex, no matter how hard we try to reduce them to simpler forms.

(5) Learning and education cannot be reduced to a science. Not because it is art, but because notions of learning and education are framed by discussion of morality, philosophy, and culture.