This Website/Blog is devoted to the concept of "Learn to Learn". I hope it will become an active community of parents, teachers, kids, educational leaders, college and university students and others who find the idea of Learn to Learn appealing and important, sharing ideas and techniques, and "walking the talk" of L2L.
I will post entries occasionally about my thoughts about L2L, and hope that the readers of this website will offer comments on my entries, and post entries of their own, so that the weblog becomes a vehicle of all of us to learn together.
"O! this learning, what a thing it is."
The Taming of the Shrew Wm. Shakespeare
Are we being left in the dust of the important social, political, economic and technological changes swirling around us? Are we clinging to learning models appropriate at best for the industrial age, and are we therefore bereft of even reasonable tools for change in this world where war and violence are seen as acceptable remedies for political problems?
Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist, recently quoted an Islamic woman. She described the education young men received in the religious schools, taught by clerics: very authoritarian and doctrinaire. When they later went to Belgium for higher education, and a professor said something like “What do you think about...”, they were stunned. They had never been asked to think about something, only absorb. Thus they reverted to an even stronger fundamentalism. “We have the answers, and don’t need to deal with questions”.
If there is anything we can do, we must help our kids to become independent learners and critical thinkers. We must emphasize skills in learning, even learning how to learn, so that we are not raising a generation of sheep following macho leaders to violence and war.
Our task involves more than teaching children liberal values. It has to do with helping them learn the means to generate their own values.
There is a concept which is gaining credibility and might well be a vehicle for moving education into a major paradigm shift, a model appropriate for parents and teachers to utilize, especially in the turmoil of our world today. It is the concept of process education.
Process education can best be described as distinct from content-transmission education. Transcendent to content transmission, it includes the idea of learning-how-to-learn, not merely learning a given body of information, discipline, or set of skills. Process education is not a replacement for content transmission education any more than holistic medicine is a replacement for traditional medicine. It should rather provide a larger framework, a more inclusive set of concepts at a higher level as we move further into the complexities of the communications era.
Process education is more related to the "how" than to the "what", more to the question than to the answer, more to the trip than to the destination. It includes such processes as learning to think, to value, to relate, and to feel.
Process education is based on experiential learning. It emphasizes helping students to learn-how-to-learn from their experiences by helping them understand how they might use their own experiences as the basis for educational growth. By evaluating her or his own experiences, the student becomes a learner, and not merely a learned individual. The learner is thus his/her own theoretician.
Associated with experiential learning is the important but little understood concept of facilitative teaching. Our role as facilitative teachers and parents should move us beyond reliance on our expert knowledge, intimacy with the discipline, and ability to provide answers. We become less of a truth-monger. The facilitative teacher/parent assumes a role more supportive of the process of learning, a role requiring that the teacher/parent have or develop the ability to help the learner ask the appropriate questions, and to orchestrate resources for the learner's use. The learner's experiences are validated. The unfortunate hierarchical distinction between teacher/parent and learner is diminished. The student becomes more of an active seeker, not an empty jug to be filled. The teacher/parent becomes a co-learner and facilitator—one who makes the learning easier—and does not assume the role of an expert whose job is to fill the minds of passive learners with the knowledge that he or she deems necessary for them to have.
The process concept defines new roles for schools and the community. Schools become supportive of the learning-how-to-learn idea rather than being exclusively devoted to disseminating already known facts. The community at large changes from being a separate constituency which the student enters when school is finished to becoming a more integrated entity with the school; it becomes an ongoing source of the content to be learned. In this new setup, students will spend significant amounts of time in the community working with others and learning from real life. Their hours in school will be devoted largely to their internalizing into their own consciousness, their own lives, the many experiences that they will be gaining by living a connected life, a life of meaning. In short, a process education program would help the student to convert real-world experiences into learning.
I have written a handbook, meant for parents, titled “Fifty Nifty Ways to Help Your Child become a Better Learner”. It is described in this Web Site/Blog under the heading "The Book".
