For most people, learning is a chore. The fact that less than 50% of young people read for pleasure can be blamed on the years spent memorising and regurgitating random facts for standardised tests.
Considering we’re now living in the intellectual revolution, this is a real shame and has some serious implications on the future well being of millions. Although access to the world’s information is now at our fingertips, our outdated educational system continues to suppress our natural desire to learn.
Learning should always be in our best interest seeing as the jobs that require ongoing mastery are quickly replacing menial roles whilst specialised knowledge combined with digital skill sets has become a thriving ground for entrepreneurs. Not to mention the various health benefits that comes with regularly challenging our brains.
Here are three ways to rekindle your love of learning…
1. Let Go Of Shame
The biggest killer of learning today comes from our backlog of past experiences. As a child, you’re extremely susceptible to somebody telling you you’re no good at maths, you’re not the academic type or allowing a single letter to decide your educational fate. These memories stay with us for life and so learning becomes synonymous with the fear of failure not the opportunity to explore.
Fortunately, when it comes to self-education, failure is not an option because there is no framework in which to be judged. Learning becomes an exploration, an ongoing mystery in which you the life-long student is constantly rethinking and recreating your own curriculum.
By accepting that your previous learning style and interests may not have fit in to an educational system designed for compliant factory workers should free you up from any shame that you may be holding on to. When you let go of your emotional baggage and learn without the risk of being penalised there’s a wonderful freedom that follows.
2. Get Personal
From an early age, schools teach us to be goal-driven instead of value or cooperation driven. We hammer home that unless students get the best grades they’re likely to end up flipping burgers in Burger King and so fear and competition become the impetus for learning.
It’s extremely difficult for a young person to understand the relationship between learning algebra and living a fulfilled life because it bears no weight on their current reality and teachers haven’t got time to make it so.
Our teachers are constantly pressurised in to hitting targets to the point that student’s identities become numerical, high achiever, low achiever, top of the class, disruptive. Learning has become something that’s done to us not by us and so it loses its magic pretty quickly.
Real learning evolves from personal curiosity. The best teachers create students who ask great questions. I’m fascinated with understanding human health and psychology because of an internal desire to understand and push my own potential.
Real learning doesn’t come with a certificate, it’s an intrinsically inspired process unique to every individual. If you want to love learning you have to reconnect with the things that make YOU tick.
3. Find Your Medium
It blows my mind that schools still expect children to write and learn exclusively in paper books using pens and pencils whilst everywhere else in their lives they’re using technology.
Nowadays ‘innovative’ IT lessons revolve around data input and excel spreadsheets. We train our young people for low-grade clerical work and wonder why none of them are interested in perusing a career in technology or engineering.
Every individual has his or her own unique style of learning, which can change daily. Some days I want to read on my kindle, others I want to watch a video or listen to a podcast – that choice is mine and it’s yours if you decide to make it.
People complain that digital is fragmenting education but learning was never meant to be linear.
The Internet has brought us a huge array of on demand learning platforms that fit in with our ever-evolving relationship with technology and so in the same way that the television remote control put the power of choice back in to the viewers hands,technology and the internet must liberate the modern learner to create their own classrooms.
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Further Listening:
Hacking Your Intelligence with Hunter Maats and Katie O’Brien
Biohacking Your Emotions and Creating a New Way of Learning
Further Viewing:
TED Re-Imagining School Playlist
Recommended Reading:
