Anti-Learning

 

From survival in the schoolyard to survival of the species, learning defines the winners. It’s not what we are or have or even do that empowers us. Rather it is how well we sense, relate and adapt. These skills are collectively known as “cleverness.” Learning is how we become more clever -  and increase our capacities to thrive.

If you’re a teacher, an instructional designer, a mentor, coach or preacher, you know this already. Your job is not merely to stuff heads with information. More importantly you show students how to learn. You equip them for a journey that you won’t make with them. That’s why science and religion - those imaginative systems for pursuing the unknowable - warrant lifelong learning and place teachers near the top of the cultural hierarchy. To learn is to live. When we stop learning - we being individuals, organizations, communities, nations, civilizations - we sink into a living death. 

Strong language that, but not gratuitous. What is the living death that starts when learning stops? Well, it isn’t the bony fellow decked in a hooded cloak wielding a scythe. It has three more familiar habits:

Entropy. A closed mind, like a closed system, always declines into entropy. Acuity dims. Energy is wasted. Effort is futile. We seem human in form only and cease to know who we are or why we exist. Others decide for us.

Inertia. The tendency to do nothing or remain unchanged makes us languid and obese. Minds that resist fresh insight are similarly disabled. Before long competence relies on static patterns instead of meaningful engagement. Absent the patterns, we are incompetent.

Reactance. Argumentative behavior that is defensive rather than inquisitive is the most common and sinister killer on this list. It is a force field that resists the rigor and risks of learning in paranoid gestures of self preservation. 

Reactance is anti-learning. It doesn’t let us become chaotic as with entropy, or stubborn as with inertia. It produces the opposite effect. We get excited and lash out. We think or do the opposite of what is expected in order to maintain our identity and independence - in effect, our cherished freedoms. 

Parents, managers and leaders of all stripes encounter reactance at every turn. Authority figures may want only what's best for the people they serve or control, but that doesn’t matter. Research shows that freedom trumps wisdom every time people have the choice. Yet how many teachers are aware of this? How many courses are designed with reactance in mind? The unfortunate answer is, practically none.

The impact of reactance depends on culture. Across whole populations reactance may produce upheaval and revolution - the bellwethers of entropy. In corporations reactance triggers attrition of customers and talent who don’t want to be told what do even when the alternatives are inferior. In education and training, reactance leads to cognitive funk. A willful, narrow or repetitive style of instruction produces courses that are “boring” - by far the most frequent complaint of students about their education. But how often have we admitted, or heard a colleague admit, that our course is boring? I will guess the answer: never, not once in our professional lives. Instead we say that the course seems boring only because the students are not engaged. That’s their fault. They don’t make the effort. 

As teachers once we grasp the principle of reactance and admit that it is natural and irresistible, we can avoid offering choices between freedom and wisdom. Instead we can lead students to wisdom through freedom. This is not a Utopian concept, but a principle that informs constructivism and experiential learning in general. 

We live in an age of imminent collapse and hopeful rejuvenation of education and training. What is clear to any non reactant observer is that many of the condoned structures and processes of learning are finished. They are graduating people who do not know how to learn, who are not equipped for their journeys, and leading to an increasingly likely crumbling of society. 

Around the edges of this pedagogical wasteland we call "school" or “training,” there are a few hopeful signs. To my mind, the most convincing is the movement towards game-based learning that is sweeping in from popular culture and the entertainment industry. Playing to learn is promising not just because it is fun or active, but because it leads to wisdom through freedom. 

Design courses that do this, and you will, as Piaget would say, produce “men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.” Your survival as a teacher - and the world itself - depends on it.

 

Comments

[Timberland UK]

I follow you VIA GFC and I love your blog!

[Argumentative Essays]

Anti-Learning<-------that's what i was looking for

[Bill Cooke]

Over fifty years ago I left the banks of the Charles and joined the army. Astonishingly I met folks who I called, for lack of a deeper insight, "pinched off". They'd stopped learning, stopped trying. I mostly blamed it on entropy. As I've aged I've watched the enormity of the pattern, down to the kids I deal with now and many (most?) of their elders. Thank you for pointing out a powerful strategy for counteracting this - anti-reactance environments. I had recognized that the pinching off was simply an insufficient will to explore, and have focused relentlessly on building curiosity. That is seeming, however, to be more a hope than a technique. On the other hand, your idea of making reactance irrelevant seems workable. example: in my army days everyone disrespected KP. I had a mess sergeant who, rather than having every square inch of his mess scrubbed and polished by reluctant hands with dirty soapy water, he issued paint brushes and complimented those who didn't leave any of the old color. What's to complain about when you are making a new pattern? Thanks for adding to my day!