Unlearning to Learn

I decided to write from a cafe today, squeezed--not uncomfortably though--behind a tiny round table, which could barely accommodate my laptop and a cup of hot chocolate. Sometimes I think better in such public places, drowned in the white noise of people's voices and the ambient traffic. 

I have in mind a few topics which I could dwell on, but I think I would like to let them marinate in my mind for a while before I sample them again for taste. Last week, I wrote about my views on our education system, which in reading back, is more of a teaser.

I'm going to riff around the same topic today because there are a few more things that I want to say--not necessarily because I think I have a solution to all the problems that beset our education system, but I just want to add a perspective that's not often expressed. 

When I was in school and even in college, I realised that there are many of my classmates who were more diligent and worked a lot harder than me.  But they did not perform better than me in exams. Is it because I am smarter? Certainly not in the regular sense. Is it because I have a better memory and is able to regurgitate back all the facts in exams? No,  and I know I don't employ some of the techniques that my classmates use to cram things into memory. 

Perhaps my only quality is that I've always understood the strengths and weaknesses of my mind, and was able to find ways to leverage or work around them. I devised my own tools and techniques to learn as effectively as I could, many which I later discovered, were techniques taught by learning experts. 

I understood the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve intuitively, and I was always looking for metaphors and analogies to understand difficult concepts. If this is considered 'intelligence', then I probably have a bit of that. But there are many types of smarts, and fate has dealt each one of us with a different hand. Some have a flair for languages, some have an innate mathematical brain, others have better social and emotion intelligence. We are all products of the genetic lottery.

A good education system has to understand all these differences and be able to help students identify and address their strengths and weaknesses. We hear about falling interests in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths). To some, this is a cause for worry. But I hear others who think that our education system is deteriorating because subjects like philosophy are not taught in universities anymore. If no one is studying science and engineering and the philosophy is no longer taught anymore, what are our students learning these days?

I believe the biggest problem we face is dogmatism. We know one discipline, one culture, one religion and think that is the solution to all the problems of the world. We today are actually blessed with more educational resources than any other generation the human species have ever possessed. The internet is the ultimate resource centre. If we are still not getting educated, it's because we're mired in dogmatism and closed-mindedness. We only use social networks to reinforce dogma. That perhaps is the biggest problem of our education system. We've mistaken dogma for knowledge. A mind filled with dogma is worse than an empty one.

Being educated means realising our own ignorance as a first step. And then only the learning adventure begins. You have to learn where the gaps are in your own mind.  Socrates's exhortation to his fellow human beings to "know thyself", is the first goal of education. Dogma is ignorance. Only when dogma is unlearned, can real learning begins.