How I Learn Stuff

Macbeth! That great Shakespeare play was playing next to my hotel in New York City. Patrick Stewart was starring. As soon as I saw the posters, I knew I must see it. In town for a gig, my weekend was completely open. I had plenty of disposable time. I could say yes to this sudden opportunity.

Moments after I got the ticket, I rushed back to my room and Googled the text of the play, skimming it in ten minutes. Just enough to get a sense of the plot and some of the key lines. I also read the synopsis on Wikipedia and one of the reviews of this particular production. This is necessary with Shakespeare. I love Shakespeare, but I don’t much understand his language. A little preparation gives me a better chance to take in the action.

Reading Shakespeare is difficult for me. It’s difficult for anyone who doesn’t study it deeply. But to watch it performed is a different experience entirely. Powerful, engaging. It’s the difference between reading about a rose and delighting in its scent.

So I headed to the theater at the appointed time, not sure of the protocol (Is it like a movie? Do I just walk in? Am I supposed to wear nice clothes?). A mass of people surrounded the doors. I couldn’t tell if there was a line or if it was just a mob. I sidled through the crowd until I had a foothold inside the lobby, next to the merchandise counter. There I saw a friendly-faced girl behind the counter, wearing a “Something wicked this way comes” tee-shirt.

“This is my first time at the theatre in New York. I’m not sure how it works. Are we waiting for the doors to open?” I asked.

“Oh yeah.” She smiled. “It will be just a couple of minutes.”

They opened the doors and we funnelled to our seats. As I sit waiting for the play to start, I realized something, everyone here loves Shakespeare! A woman behind me was chatting with her husband about the finer points of Shakespearean dialogue. I wanted to turn around and say, “Excuse me, I’m going to join your conversation, because I need to learn more about this from someone passionate and educated like you.” Instead I sat still, not wanting to interrupt her with my awkward enthusiasm. Maybe during intermission I could corner her.

The play began, and the very first speech set the pattern for the whole performance.  Complicated archaic phrases came at the me in globs and tumbles. It was like one of those booths where they blow dollar bills all over you and you try to grab as many as you can.

“Doubtful it stood; as two spent swimmers, that do cling together and choke their art. The merciless Macdonwald– worthy to be a rebel, for to that the multiplying villanies of nature do swarm upon him–from the western isles of kerns and gallowglasses is supplied; and fortune, on his damned quarrel smiling, show’d like a rebel’s whore: but all’s too weak: for brave Macbeth–well he deserves that name– disdaining fortune, with his brandish’d steel, which smoked with bloody execution, like valour’s minion carved out his passage till he faced the slave…”

What was that about swimmers? Gallowglasses? I think I got the gist: Macbeth did good.

My preparation helped, because all I needed to do was fit the words to the plot I already knew. Plus there are lots of cues in the props and movements of the actors: a bloody knife, held by someone covered in blood, suggests a recent murder. Stuff like that.

So there I was, in the dark, watching Lady Macbeth urge her husband to kill the King of Scotland, when it dawned on me: being in that audience trying to puzzle through Shakespeare felt just like learning computers, philosophy, history, or most things. It’s the same kind of experience. Bracing, confusing, and fun!

Consider that. I was struggling to understand the action. This struggle was not easy. Yet instead of feeling frustrated, I felt gleeful. Rarely have I been so aware of my own ignorance and yet so comfortable with it. Maybe it was the fact that I knew most people around me were also struggling with it. Maybe it was my sense of the actors passion for their work– they wanted me to get it, they were enunciating and using their whole bodies to help me understand. The theater transformed into an ideal classroom, I felt the audience pulling and the actors pushing and all of us puzzling it out together.

I felt good, not about ignorance itself, but at the glorious opportunity ignorance was giving me. My ignorance stood like a block of marble before me and it was yielding to my chisel. By the time I emerged from the theater, back into daylight, I would have sculpted, in some small way, a new mind.

So, this is the mystery of learning, for me. I’m not excited about learning techniques, although I do talk a little about them in my book. What matters more to me is the feeling of learning. What is it like to learn something important? How do I bottle that glorious feeling and release it again on command? What feelings prevent me from learning, and how do I overcome them?

One major theme here is that complexity can be intimidating, but it can also be motivating. We need to find those conditions that make it motivating. I’m working on that. Scribbling in my notebook, in the dark theater, while the sound and fury on the stage signifies everything.

Tanya writes:

…I can’t envision a system other than schools to give kids learning experiences. I’ve tried to imagine it, but I can’t. Can you help me?

Stay-at-home teaching parents or professionals are fabulous for those who can get them, I’m sure, but I don’t see how everyone could get them.

Apprenticeships are good if the kid knows what he/she wants to do from a young age, or if they can take the knowledge to another realm if they want to move to something else.

What about before they’re old enough to apprentice, though? What would be the alternative to what is done now?

Here’s my answer in a few parts:

1. Ordinary daily life is an ongoing learning experience.

Who escapes from that experience? No one. To think that kids need a special injection of “learning experiences” in order to prepare for life is a disempowering myth created by schoolists. We can live and learn without any special schooling, whatsoever. Have you heard of kids going to video game school to learn how to play Halo 2? No. The ones who want to play teach themselves without the need for assigned homework.

Everyone has a mind. Every mind develops in some way. Morally, I have no basis to say how someone else’s mind should develop. I see it as a personal matter.

But what about my own son? As a father I have a responsibility to open the way for him– to provide options and resources– but that doesn’t mean I have to impose my intellectual values. For that matter, I have also not imposed my spiritual values. He will decide those for himself. Maybe that means he will not be a doctor or lawyer when he’s 24 years old. But I say: it’s not a race, it’s not a competition. It’s just his whole life. I don’t need him to win awards or Olympic medals. I just want him to feel that his life is fully his own.

He will find a passion and follow it. Or else he won’t. He will learn how to take care of himself out of simple necessity and a wish to be respected in his community. Or else he won’t. He gets to live with his choices. But I see my job as knocking down what he sees as the obstacles to progress, not to shackle him to my own ambitions.

My son doesn’t need schooling for an education, but he may well choose schooling. When he was five, we had to choose for him, because school is compulsory. We didn’t want to fight the U.S. government, so we chose the least manipulative form of schooling that we could find: Montessori. By sheer luck, there was a fantastic Montessori school in my town during the K-6 years. Since then we’ve homeschooled. Our homeschooling style is non-directive.

2. Let education be available, not conscripted.

In a free society, I would like to see universal free access to basic and advanced educational resources. Anyone who chooses ought to be able to study any field they wish, tuition free. I love public libraries and online resources. I also love the idea of learning communities and networks.

I adore the Summerhill school, in England.  It’s a free school. Students are not required to attend classes, but they are available. Once I saw an interview with a former Summerhill student who graduated without knowing how the read. He spoke of how he was just never interested in reading. Years later he decided he wanted to learn (because he was teaching English in Japan) and three months later he knew how to read. That’s that. And that’s how believe it should be– let’s teach kids that there is a way to learn whatever they want or need to know. Let’s offer it to them. Then stop worrying.

But you know, I soon lose interest in imagining what we should do as a nation or a species. What I do, I do on a personal level. I live as an example to my friends, colleagues, and family. I share my excitement about learning with anyone who cares to listen. I have this good news for parents: I, too, was a “lazy” video-game-playing stubborn kid, once. Since then I learned how to support myself and a family, too.

3. Remember, context matters.

A helpful answer for you depends on why you are asking the question. If you are a public school teacher, there is very little you can do to change the system. If you are a parent wondering about your own children, or a philosopher pondering the bigggest picture, that is a very different matter.

I like to talk about how no one needs school to become a successful, educated intellectual. But when I talk to most ordinary people about this, I routinely face an obstacle. This obstacle has a name: the fundamental attribution error.

Usually it comes up like this: I say something about how I was successful without schooling, and they say “Oh, that’s because YOU are super smart and YOU had fabulous advantages normal people don’t have.” The implication is that my exeriences are not relevant evidence.

Funny, though. My teachers in school, when they told me I could not succeed in life unless I followed their instructions, didn’t seem to feel that I was so special. It’s only after I violated their predictions that they “realized” I was different. That allowed them to save their theory of the how the world works, and to go on persecuting the next generation of young minds. This kind of equivocation about what counts as evidence is also called the self-sealing fallacy or the “no true scotsman” fallacy.

How to get around it?

There’s no sure way around it. People get to decide what they will accept or reject. But I do have some ideas:

1. I sometimes say “Yes I am special. And maybe everybody is in one way or another. Let kids learn in any way that fits for them.”
2. I sometimes say “Yes. I am special– I’m especially scatterbrained. I have no discipline to speak of. I’m unable to force myself to think about any particular thing. And yet I make a living as an intellectual. How you explain that?”
3. I sometimes say “It doesn’t matter who’s special and who’s normal. When the state makes schooling compulsory, the state does the equivalent of establishing a religion. This is wrong for exactly the same reason that a state religion would be wrong. Schooling does not equal education. Compulsory schooling is anathema to a free society, and discrimination based on schooling should appall us.”
4. And I sometimes say “Regardless of how you think about school, there is also life. Let’s talk about how learning can happen outside of school, too.”

To make people more receptive, one tactic that helps a lot is to help them discover some talent, skill, or combination of skills that make them interesting and unique. I suspect that a lot of resistance to a philosophy of liberation is based on fear that if everyone is free to succeed in their own way, then “maybe I will be the only one who fails.” There is comfort in the feeling that everyone is forced to play the same game, epecially when the game is rigged to reward mediocrity.

I guess this Blackberry commercial is supposed to be funny, but I found it to be chilling and a little sickening.

So, what are they showing here? They show that if “delivery people” ran the world, schools would be prisons. Instead of school buses, they use paddy wagons. Note that the “freshman” is liberated from a locker, which makes sense, since of course the main thing they teach at that school is confinement. No wonder the kids confine themselves and each other. When the student is set free, the message is do as we say, not as we do.

If the commercial was extended, perhaps we’d see the authorities try to “deliver” packaged knowledge and call that education.

A commercial like this is only intelligible because we know that public schools already are prisons. Note that if the ad started with “If prison guards ran the world…” they wouldn’t need to change a single thing about it. It would still make sense. A terrible kind of sense…