Students, teachers, parents, all learn. Still it seems that the word 'learning' is taken as solely reserved for students. Actually we all continuously learn and need to keep learning. Then where is the difference from students? The differences lie in the rate of learning, complexity of learning and quantity of learning. Or maybe you can say that the differences are all in the quantity and quality of learning.
This is learning about learning. Parents and many tutors can be skeptical about this idea of learning about learning. Afterall we never hear such a thing usually. Generations are learning their education and career training without paying even a little concern about how exactly they are learning!
Naturally queries are bound to arise on the relevancy and necessity of reading about such stuffs like learning about learning. Why do we need to do this if we can even complete our PhDs without such a thing? Parents and tutors can argue this. Students may feel it is weird and complex and can keep full faith on the way they are learning from their childhood.
If I suggest that these theories are still relevant and useful for tutors as well as parents then that can be a little shocking for them. After all, most of them are done with their learning and education. So now teachers are with the job of teaching and parents are busy grooming up their child.
Yes, in most cases we see this. But the problem is elsewhere. If a kindergarten tutor needs a certification and a secondary or higher secondary school teacher preferably needs a degree in education beside degrees in his or her own subject, then what makes a parent feel so confident that helping a child grow and learn will not take any knowledge or education for them in that subject?
I think a parent has to require more responsibilities and effort than a school teacher or a home tutor for the growth and education of the child. Especially in the young days a child is much more dependent on his or her parents than school teachers or home tutors. And a parent most naturally and most usually gets more time to spend with that child. A good and knowledgeable parent can make every moment of that time spent productive and beneficial for the child. This is why parents need child nurturing and grooming education.
A teacher may have done his or her degree in education or certification a decade ago or more. But it is easily imaginable and believable that in a span of 10 years lots of additions, subtractions, modifications, etc. are done in almost any subject of human knowledge. So how can a teacher be aware of these developments?
Moreover, in most universities and institutes, the course syllabus is usually not the most current one but perhaps much older. If such is the case then it is possible that a teacher may be teaching his students with knowledge and theories that are almost a few decades or even more than half a century older!
In degrees and certifications, usually theoretical knowledge is more important than their practical implementation. A teacher has his responsibilities to convert those theoretical knowledge to his practical teaching practices. But that needs continuous learning and experimentation. Very rare are cases where a teacher does this sincerely and effectively.
This is why learning theories are excessively important for the students as well as the tutors and parents. The Covid-19 pandemic situation is a good case study for this. With minimum preparation time and infrastructure schools and home tutors required to shift to online mode of teaching from traditional offline classroom mode. But almost no teacher and parent were properly trained and knowledgeable about the process of online education and its pitfalls. It’s not just about installing a few apps or software in a laptop or smartphone and you are all ready to go. But many thought it was so easy.
Last few decades, with the development of computers, internet, multimedia and smartphones, there has been anticipated a big change in the process of education delivery as well as reception. Lots of research and studies have been done in this area throughout the world. But not many teachers and parents are at all aware of any such theory or process. But all were willingly or unwillingly compelled to this mode of education due to the pandemic situation. Situation of education could have been much different if these tutors and parents would have cultivated the learning mode for those new and latest developments in education theory.
Learning sophistication as well as amount of information are fast increasing. Together they will make the process of learning and education more complex and ambiguous than ever before. I used the term ambiguous because now it will be even more hard to understand or determine whether one is really learning or just loading on information in the brain.
Many information stuffed brains initially appear as quite well learned and knowledgeable but that is exactly not the way it appears. Even people with more information can perform better in the IQ tests, competitive examinations and interviews. Thus mistakenly information will become a substitute marker for knowledge and let’s better not talk about wisdom.
Most of all our environmental and social learning platforms will encourage information type of learning. Our education institutions and examinations will measure information. Surprisingly and perhaps naturally, the quality of thought and living will decrease with the advent of information over knowledge. Whereas in reality education is supposed to modify and upgrade our thoughts and living, that should have been the main purpose of education, ideally.
Population is ever increasing in the world as well as in this country. Competition on information will scale new heights with passing days. Every opportunity, from education to employment, will be determined on the basis of such competitions. This is going to generate a very deep level of educational and psychological crisis among future youngstars as well as their parents and tutors. There is no way out of this. No way to curb the competition, no way to curb the population. Then what can be the way out of this?
As of now, the only way out seems to be hiding in the theories of learning. I think eras of philosophers gifted us these theories for an anticipated role to handle situations as grave and as complex as this. More research is going on to address the current and upcoming situations related to education and its outcomes.
An era is to come when human knowledge and capabilities will be measured by machines. Humans have to compete not only with fellow humans but also with machines in different areas of life and living. In this dark era of education the value of knowledge will scale down to depths never ever seen or thought.
So we can see the current problems and the future problems with our education and learning. It’s true that the solutions of these problems are not only very tough but perhaps impossible too. But we are human beings, we are equipped to deal with problems and find solutions for betterment of mental and physical living. So we cannot and are not supposed to sit with hands folded with this problem as well. We need to fight and deal with this also upto our maximum capacity.
From the time of the stone age, from the era of discovering fire and agriculture, the metal, we human beings are in the process of solving problems with knowledge and intelligence. This is our best equipment to solve all natural and unnatural problems that can arise in our life on this planet. So again we go in the same track. We need to go to the depth of the human learning and intellectual processes to find and figure out the role of information and importance of knowledge for us. We need to discover the differences between our learning with machine learning.
In this process which can save our current and next generations of human thought and faculties, teachers and parents are going to play pivotal roles. With the view of such responsibilities and requirements, discussion on human learning theories will be getting more and more relevant and a necessity as well. In this context, I will be writing on these theories, here and elsewhere. I will write blogs, articles, books and anything else that will be available in future in every possible media, from websites to social media and whatever else will be available in days to come.
This is my drive to start writing on learning theories and human education processes on this website. KridhaTutor.com is a great platform which will unite a huge number of students, parents and teachers at a common point with a common interest. And that common interest is education.
Together we will explore ages of learning theories, from psychological, educational as well as neurological and biological viewpoints. We will try to define and understand information and knowledge, but not exactly as in their dictionary meanings but emphasized in human perspectives. We will also explore current developments in learning theories and try to understand their implications and application in your child’s or student’s education.
Before we get into any discussion on learning theory, we need to understand the meaning of a few key terms. I would like to start with the very term – Education.
We all use this term every now and then, but how many of us can really place a proper definition? Not many I suppose. This word Education is a very diverse term which encompasses many ideas and philosophies developed with changing eras of time and changing geographical locations. Actually every era of time and every location have got their own requirements of meaning of education and thus defined. But we can explore and find some harmony, some point of unification, which will be useful for our current study on education instead of debating on its diversifications.
To start with let us see what American Psychological Association (APA) says about the term Education –
They are using 3 key terms to define education –
- Knowledge
- Skill
- Value
I will discuss knowledge and skill later on. First let us look at the 3d term – Value.
I will ask a question – Do you think that information can create value in a person’s life and thoughts? Your hard drive and memory cards can have a huge amount of information stored and retrievable. What value does that create in your life or lifestyle? So equally there is no point of making your own brain another information storage device like the drives and cards.
So we need something else or something more than just an inbuilt memory storage device. That something more will define the education of a human being. Otherwise our brain will be nothing more than a memory card and that also of very limited capacity compared to current devices available scaling to gigabytes and terabytes.
As we can see in the definition, we need to acquire values. We need to acquire knowledge and skills. So it is not something that just can be passed on or copy & pasted as we do with our electronic memory devices. And the word teaching is to assist in acquiring. It is not to make us learn by rote reading our books and notes. So teachers and parents are supposed to take care of this point. They should assist to acquire values, skills and knowledge. But do you think that nowadays acquiring values are anyway in the focus?
You must be wondering by now where the value falls short? We learn, we get educated, we get skills, turn to professionals and earn a huge lot to live a good life and so on. So that’s a lot of values indeed. So where is the question of not adding value? Well you are partially right. When our education contributes to our economics then of course that is a value. Actually the word skill in the American Psychological Association (APA) definition is mostly indicating practical abilities applicable in profession and life. So skills can add value to economics and living standards. But do you think that the whole value of our education is just this much?
So where are the values falling short? This is a big question of insight. And before we can attempt to find an answer to this question we need to understand the purposes of human education. If we should limit our education for the sole purpose of improving our economics then perhaps the discussion stops here. We indeed often acquire a lot of economic value out of our education. But if we suppose that education has something more to do, something more important perhaps, then what we discuss next makes any sense. But before that let us ask ourselves a simple question –
If education has to have only economic value then should we understand that if a person does not need to use his education for earning his living then that person can remain uneducated and there is no problem in that? Actually in the real world most of us do not use the education we have got from our college and universities to earn our living. For example a clerk can be a graduate in a subject but does not use his knowledge and skill to earn his living. So should we suppose that his education of university graduation is in vain or useless? You can find more than enough similar examples if you can look and observe your surroundings.
So if economic value contribution is one purpose of our education then what are the others? Let me give you a good example.
Let us suppose a parent couple has a lot of money. And they have a child. Now they don’t have education. So they don’t have much information either. They don’t know that they need to send their child to school so that he can get his education. Every child should get his education. This is a piece of valuable information that our schools and colleges teach us. So we got this information and turned it into our sense of value from the process of education from some source. That some source can be anything, starting from a school or college to another person or a book or anything like that.
So if the parent does not have the valued knowledge that their child should go to a good school, then all the money they have will sit idle or get misused but the child will remain deprived from education and hence any major skill gain. Then naturally when the child will enter his professional life then he would not get the best job and opportunities. This can create a lifelong lack of good economics for that child. So what can we see out of this small example?
The morale can be like this: even to use the monetary economics properly in order to add value to one’s own life and others’ lives we need education first and then money second. Otherwise all the money will be misused and instead of creating any value it will degrade us. The parents already had the education about how to properly use their money for the benefit of their child, so the child went to school and started getting educated.
I would like to conclude this by a couple of small but useful examples. These are to show how our education fails to create values in our life except only economical values. And will also show how information acquisition and value addition are not essentially the same thing.
Drinking milk is good for our health.
This is a very tiny piece of information. And I guess perhaps it will be quite challenging to find a person who does not know this piece of information. But in most cases, this information fails to develop any value in our life. Knowing this information does not mean that we have added a lot of value in our life. Not many students and even not many teachers and parents drink milk regularly. People with financial disabilities or medical issues can be exempted but what about the others? But we all have this piece of information in our head.
Cigarette smoking is injurious for health
Who is there who does not carry this simple piece of information in his head? Even governments made it compulsory to print this information on every box of cigarettes. So whenever we buy a pack of cigarettes then we get this information right on the packet. Do you think that this information ever created any value in our life?
I conclude my discussion on the definition of education here. We will do more of it in later articles. We will also look at the definitions of learning and knowledge. And we will try to explore and understand the learning theories of different philosophers and educationists. Please stay in touch and keep visiting KridhaTutor website blog for further updates.