Teaching People To Learn

Common sense seems to be in very short supply. Perhaps it always was.
Even allowing for the creative and often hysterical reporting of the news media it is hard to avoid the conclusion that those making and executing laws and regulations in both Britain and the EU have taken leave of their senses. A previous culture of personal responsibility seems to have changed into a culture of dependence and blame.
Not, of course, entirely, but significantly.
This is wholly understandable. A society that rewards the feckless and punishes the responsible must expect the message to be understood and acted upon. Perhaps our rulers have forgotten that true compassion – indeed, true love – involves helping people to achieve and maintain their independence. Removing independence is theft of the most precious possession we have.
So far this sounds more like a political speech on behalf of the British Fascist Party than a basis for discussing what people need to learn. I make these points, however, because unless our education system starts with the right premise, everything else that it does will at best be ineffective and at worst be damaging.
I don’t need to tell you the difference between education and training, between knowledge and reflection, between information and thought. So I’ll skip the bit about facts, passing exams, exam marking and the roulette wheel of teachers who can (and those who cannot) forecast the likely questions with reasonable accuracy. I’ll omit the scathing references I would have made about people who decry the Arts subjects. I’ll nod only briefly towards the words of George Santayana (1863-1952) ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it‘.
I’ll go on to why what we need to learn has changed so much and so recently.
My first point is that in the past few years and with considerable Government help, we have come to understand better the relationship between body and brain. If there is a work / life balance to be struck there is also a body / brain balance in need of attention.
Today we are at the threshold of understanding the mind. We have not got there yet but we will, and reasonably soon if I am not much mistaken. We have started to appreciate that the mental prisons we often feel trapped in are largely of our own making. We are all capable of much more than we thought.
Such potential brings with it the responsibility to use well the resources we manipulate and to learn a new view of the time over which we manipulate them. Strangely, our Victorian forebears had a better sense of this aspect of time than we do. They invested for what they saw as the future; we invest for the next annual – or half-yearly, or quarterly – sometimes even monthly – profit results.
Proper planning has never been so important and never so neglected.
Second, we need to learn the basic skills of interpersonal communication – or social intercourse, if you like. Whether you were in favour of invading Iraq or against it I think we can all agree that in the 21st Century settling disagreements by thuggery is an admission of failure on a breathtaking scale. But that thuggery doesn’t originate in the White House or Downing Street, it originates in Coronation Street, in your local town, the nearby neighbourhood, in the way we speak to a traffic warden, in the way officials deal with us.
Have you noticed how people seldom ask questions of each other these days?
Maybe they think it’s intrusive or not very polite. At a time when many of us are going to spend more time in front of our computers we need to improve our social intercourse and change it from the drinks party or the Friday night booze-up to intelligent, informed discussion laced with that unique ability we have to be amusing about serious matters.
Some races have always been rather inhibited about asking questions. We cannot afford such inhibitions any more. It leads to a collection of floating islands, not to a society.
Third, we need to learn the joy of work. We’ve separated work and leisure to the point where work is seen as bad and leisure is seen as good. But everyone knows that too much of either is wrong. To do this we must make work joyful, not always easy when rough conditions, noisy machinery, inconsiderate bosses, rapacious shareholders demand effort and forbearance that is above and beyond normal duty. For all that, work must become a place of joy.
We seem to have failed to learn that the true satisfaction of a job well done is not in dollars but in the heart of the person doing it. In my mentoring the simple and true story of Alf Tuck, the man who came to thatch the cottage roof, has transformed the attitudes of hundreds of people towards their work.
If you want to know it, please ask me by email, and I will send it to you.
Fourth, we need to reconsider what facts we need to know. Five years ago it was important to know quite a lot of facts. Today we need to know different facts:
– how to access and store information on the internet
– how to discriminate between right and wrong information and good and bad sources
– how to reflect on the facts we learn; facts by themselves are like random numbers; they only
– become useful when we interpret them and make decisions based on them.
Fifth, our civilisation is based on trust. That trust is based on truth, a commodity in very short supply at present. No truth, no trust. No trust, no society. There will never be perfect truth and we have to learn to distinguish between truth, lies and hyperbole. If we do not understand and accept the relevance of truth for our very existence, our society will increasingly fail.
There are many other things we have to learn, of course. These are, to my way of thinking, the five essentials. They are at present being neglected in favour of doubtful academic awards.
If you agree with my very brief summary of what people need to learn today there is one remaining question: where do we get the teachers to do it?
That’s my question to you.

John Bittleston blogs at TerrificMentors.com, a site that provides mentoring for those who wish a change in career or job, wanting to start a business or looking to improve their handling of people (including themselves).