Learning things is generally hard, especially the biologically secondary learning (what we learn in the curriculum in school and college, trying to learn a musical instrument or a foreign language etc). What makes it hard includes:
- The need to apply ourselves ; we instinctively like to avoid significant effort – which is why we like, for example, online apps that promise to make the learning ‘easy’
- The consistency required: try learning to play the violin by having one lesson per month with no practice in between; we have to put in the hard yards – hours and hours of work – for significant, sustained learning to happen
- The need to struggle: learning happens in what some scientists call the ‘liminal space’ between not quite understanding and understanding; it’s uncomfortable in that space – we don’t enjoy struggling, we want to ‘get it’ as quickly and easily as possible
- Our instinctive response to failing: I just can’t do this, I’m rubbish at maths, I give up, I don’t understand…; the process of learning requires regular – perhaps constant – failure, and the feedback that arises from it, but we are programmed to dislike failing and we are attracted to perfect performance (perhaps that’s a cultural thing rather than a biological one)
- We often do it wrong; we don’t learn best how to run marathons by running marathons; we don’t learn the piano by sitting down in lesson one and having a good old bash at Rakmaninov’s piano concerto number 2 without having started with Three Blind Mice (ie lack of prior knowledge) – misunderstanding how we learn well is a significant barrier to learning well
- We forget: forgetting is natural, but it’s also frustrating to put in a load of effort – say we spend two weeks reading a whole book about how the brain works or the history of Afghanistan – only to find that we can’t remember most of it when we are done
These factors often combine (I just don’t want to try hard spending many hours, over a long time, is a mixture of my first two bullet points above); no doubt there are many other things that make learning hard, such as our personal circumstances (I may have a learning disability, for example, or I may have suffered a significant trauma recently etc).
To make learning a bit easier, we could flip these things over. We could embrace upfront:
- The need to make a big effort to learn. I know it’s going to require a lot of effort on my part and I’m prepared to put it in
- The need to go at it consistently – practising the piano 3, 4 or 5 times a week on average is likely (there are no guarantees) to get us to a good place, in time
- The fact that we will struggle; we expect to struggle and that’s more than okay, it’s a good thing because from the struggle comes the learning
- The value in failing. Failure is good as long as we keep going, and learn from it. Mistakes are important; we need to see them as a natural part of learning and keep going
- The need to understand how best to learn the thing we want to learn – this might differ from thing to thing (learning piano will involve some different techniques from learning about Ancient Greek civilisation), so we try to find out what works best for what we are aiming to learn
- The value of arresting the natural forgetting that we are all prone to – through revisiting, testing ourselves and being tested, getting and acting on feedback, and so on
Learning is hard, but we can certainly make it a bit easier by doing it right.
