… is that it’s wrong. Simple, unfounded nonsense.
I know that even if I strongly disagree with a thing someone says, there’s often a nugget of truth in it – but try as I might, I see no such nugget in this one. Why do some people believe that ‘We all learn differently’? Let me say first why it isn’t true, before I offer my own answer.
First of all, if the ‘We all’ is indeed everyone, there are currently around 7.75 billion of us on the planet. Which means there could be more than 7.75 billion ways of learning, say, how to read music, or the names of the kings and queens of England, or the times tables. And since the population of the planet is growing all the time, doesn’t that mean that the number of different ways to learn will have to be growing, too, to keep pace?Really?
Second, as human beings we share many characteristics, including our extraordinary, large brains – which is where all of the learning happens. So, since our brains are very much alike, how likely is that each one of us will learn differently from every other person? Not very, surely.
But here’s the key point: learning happens when new information is picked up by our senses (cognitive neuroscientists often refer to the ultra-short-term memory as ‘iconic’ or ‘sensory’ memory) and some of it enters our working memory because we pay attention to it, from where some of it gets transferred, over time, to our long-term memory – usually as the result of attention again, and rehearsal. When information makes it into our long-term memory, we can say we’ve ‘learned’ it. THAT is the learning process, simply put, and that’s how it works – for all of us.
I think that many people believe we ‘all learn differently’ because they are confusing the processes through which we learn with their preferences for the kinds of specific activities they might do in order to learn. When asked, some people express a preference for learning by doing physical things, some people feel they learn mostly from visual images, and some people say they prefer learning through words and groups of words captured in texts. Indeed, some people are even convinced that they learn best when they’re listening to their favourite band banging out some ‘toons’… The reality is that at school we mostly learn through a combination of visual and verbal modes – that is, through images and words – and by thinking about them. ‘When it comes to learning stuff, just don’t ask me to write anything down’, someone once said to me. Good luck with learning well, and passing most tests and exams then.
Learning physical things, like riding a bike, can feel different in that they involve us moving our bodies. But, fundamentally, the learning process is the same: to learn to ride a bike, we watched other people doing it; at some point we got on ourselves and we had a go; we probably put our feet on the ground as we searched for balance scooting shakily along; we almost certainly fell off a bit. But we kept at it until everything coalesced and we did it. Learning to ride a bike, drive a car, and bake a cake – things that involve the acquisition of procedural knowledge or ‘skills’ – is essentially knowledge plus practice – just like map-reading, writing history essays and conjugating French verbs. In all of these, we are taking in information through our senses, processing it, practising it (rehearsal) and retrieving it later, to help make it stick in our long term memory.
Having preferences for the kinds of activities we like to do is categorically not the same as ‘learning differently’. We learn in remarkably similar ways, because of the many characteristics we share. As babies we mostly learned by copying others, especially our parents and other family members; this biologically primary learning is largely visual and auditory – we see and hear and we copy, often using movements, too. The biologically secondary learning we do at school, on the other hand. is mostly done by processing words and images and by combining them.
It’s just as well that we all learn very similarly because, if we didn’t, teachers would not be able to teach large classes of students with any hope of success.
