Learning

The role of learning in our lives is vastly beyond our common conception.

Everything we think, know, and believe, we learn. Our knowledge, skills, habits, attitudes, values, and ideals are learned. What aspect of yourself, your family, your culture, your society wasn’t shaped, if not determined, by learning?

Perhaps the most underappreciated word in our common vocabulary, the ways we commonly define learning profoundly limit the ways we think about educating and parenting:

Learning, noun

The act or experience of one that learns - Knowledge or skill acquired by instruction or study - Modification of a behavioral tendency by experience (as exposure to conditioning)

Learn, verb

transitive verb: To gain knowledge or understanding of or skill in by study, instruction, or experience (learn a trade) – MEMORIZE (learn the lines of a play) - To come to be able (learn to dance) – To come to realize (learned that honesty paid) - To come to know: HEAR (we just learned that he was ill)

intransitive verb: To acquire knowledge or skill or a behavioral tendency

Contrary to the above, learning is much more than acquiring or remembering knowledge, skills, behaviors, and experiences. Learning is the central dynamic of our health, personal achievement, relationships, jobs, economics, and politics – it’s the core exercise through which our intelligencesphysical, spatial, sensory, kinesthetic, emotional, cognitive, linguistic, social, spiritual... develop. For each and all of us, learning affects everything about how we know and experience ourselves and the worlds we live in. Learning is the central dynamic through which humans progress from new born infants to geriatric adults. 

The following are other words for learning.  The way we use them (and many others) obscures our appreciation for learning.

Any meaningful reform of education must begin by re-defining, socially-broadly, the word learning. Learning isn’t just an ancillary mental utility, learning is the central dynamic of being human.