Learning Matters

The book has been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of years and I have delved into its pages on several occasions, but events have seen me distracted after the first twenty odd pages. The book has travelled between Nepal, Thailand and Malaysia – a well-travelled book, which I have always felt needed to be kept by my side as an important one to read in its entirety one day. Well I have ‘begun’ to read it again in recent days, and hope that I will be able to stick with it this time.

The book has prompted me to write a little about “learning”. As an educator I find myself mulling on the word and idea all the time. I often write that it is at the core of all that we do in school, but a part of me worries that it is not or not half as much as it should be. The book in question is not What’s the Point of School? by Guy Claxton, which I was much influenced by when  I first read it in Nepal, but one of Claxton’s earlier works, Hare Brain Tortoise Mind. The sentiment and central message of the latter book resonates with a belief that I have held dear for many years, namely the value of giving time to slow learning. I have often said to parents that education is not a race. And this message to parents is borne out of my desire to see all educators take the pressure and stress out of learning, to allow for time to mess about with learning, and to allow learning to take place for its intrinsic value and for reasons that the learner has brought to it herself. Not to say that the more deliberative d-mode learning that Claxton refers to is not important. It is just that this kind of thinking has underpinned our examination system and has taken over too much of the educational endeavour in schools, to the detriment of more creative and intuitive learning, we maintain.

Being myself a quiet learner who likes to dream, recollect dreams, day dream and contemplate, perhaps you can forgive me for my indulgence in liking this thesis, but if such an understanding of “know-how” can be rescued and given a complementary place in 21^st century learning and its attendant technologies, then perhaps, I believe, we will create more balance and more ‘holism’ to our modern, frenetic lives.