How to Learn

Learning is not spray paint. You don't enter a school and it automatically covers you in knowledge. Learning requires active participation.

Most people don't know how to learn. They memorize. They read their texts over and over, and as long as a question matches the words they have forced into their mind they can answer. If a question is phrased in such a way to demand thought, they become catatonic.

In learning a difficult Italian Aria, a soprano doesn't have to know Italian, just how to get the syllables and the notes to match. So too, a large number of students. They can rattle off long theorems but haven't a clue what they are talking about.

To learn means to make that information part of your consciousness. To be able to visualize, to see the connections between new information and old.

Just as you can watch a television serial and remember the names of the characters and the plots from year to year without conscious effort, so too can you learn all the rulers of England, philosophies, scientific theorems.

The question is how do you learn? How did you come to learn all about that television serial? Surely you didn't sit down with a text, a notebook, a pen, watch, transcribe, study. Somehow the information painlessly entered your brain.

How did that happen?

Children are taught "nursery rhymes" to teach them how to learn. They hear something over and over, it becomes familiar, they repeat it. They can move from nursery rhymes to the Alphabet, to numbers, using the same repetition, memorization they used for the rhyme.

But there has to come a point where they can go from A = Apple to realizing that the same sound the 'A' makes there is the same sound it makes with Avocado, and that if Apple begins with an "A", then Avocado must begin with an "A".

That jump is the blue print for how one learns. Until one can make the jump, one has not learned. One has memorized.

The way to provoke the "jump" is when one can find an "old" bit of information and match it to a "new" bit; as with the letter "A".

If one reads history as a bunch of unconnected events happening randomly, one will never learn History. They might memorize a few dates, connect a few incidents, but history will remain an indecipherable montage.

Historical television programs have done a great deal in spreading (mis)information. You "see" Cleopatra or Queen Elizabeth I, or Shaka Zulu, and become interested in the character, the plot, the dialog, and so you open yourself to participation in the presentation.

It is this opening of your intellect to this drama which puts things in a logical order, and makes it "live'.

Because you have "seen" it, you can remember it visually. If you also read along with the program, you gain nuances which might have been left out or twisted by the producers.

Other subjects are more difficult to visualize.

In science, for example, an experiment can prove or disprove a theory. You can see, for example, that raw meat doesn't make maggots, that maggots are made when flies lay their eggs in raw meat.

In English you need to hear the words pronounced, defined, and used, so as to create that template in your mind. Hearing a word like persiflage will only make sense to you, and become part of your vocabulary if you use it in a sentence correctly.

You can not think about what you can not find words for. Hence, until persiflage is performed, you might not realise it exists. Sometimes one will create a word to describe something for which they do not have the word; depending on their vocabulary they may coin a phrase or be incomprehensible, but the fact that a brain is being utilized can not be denigrated. An example of learning is using a piece of rubber tire as a door hinge.

One has seen a door hinge, one has extrapolated how it works, one sees a piece of old tire. One nails one piece to the frame, another to the door. The door can open and close. Depending on the size of the door, the thickness of the tire, one might have to use two or three pieces. Yes, it doesn't work as well as an actual hinge, but the fact that one has been able to appreciate the properties of the hinge, that is learning.