ARTIFICIAL LEARNING?
As Harvard's Jack Shonkoff (Neurons to Neighborhoods) said: "Children are born ready to learn. We don't have to make them ready to learn. We don't have to teach them how to learn. They are wired from the beginning to learn, and they're wired to experience and to master the world around them."
However, Dr. Shonkoff is referring to 'natural modes of learning', not the 'artificial modes of learning' that success in school and later life depends on. We do have to teach children how to learn ARTIFICIALLY, and their lives depend on how well we do it. Most of the children who struggle in school are struggling with artificial learning challenges.
Reading, writing, math, and all their abstract, conventional, and technological outgrowths, require our brains to process information in complexly artificial ways. Whereas we learn to move, feel, touch, smell, taste, hear, emote, walk, and talk by reference to the immediate internal feel of learning them, in the artificial domains we learn from the external, abstract, authority of who or what we are learning from. In natural modes of learning we learn from immediately synchronous (self-generated) feedback on the edge of participating (falling while walking). In the artificial modes, (other-provided) feedback can be way out of ‘sync’ with the learning it relates to (test results in school provide feedback far downstream from the learning they measure).
This is important. Without differentiating these significantly different modes of learning we create the conditions in which children grow up feeling ashamed of their minds. How that happens, how 1/2 (or more) of our kids grow up learning to feel ashamed of their learning for not being good enough at learning like a machine, is the bigger issue.
The issue isn't learning to learn. It's learning not to become learning disabled while learning to become artificially learning enabled.
