You might have heard this before but the purpose of the current school system is to prepare you for a factory job. That means understanding instructions, reading at a low level, and doing simple math.
But we don’t live in a factory society any longer. We live in a knowledge society.
However, when you’re getting people ready to work in a factory and you base everything around standardized tests to ensure that your worker bees are prepared you teach learning in a way that doesn’t teach people how to learn.
You teach them how to memorize.
Because in the 1940s when you graduated and went off to the factory you weren’t supposed to need critical thinking skills. You simply had to follow the instructions that were given to you.
This means the hardest part of learning how to learn isn’t the actual learning how to learn. It’s unlearning everything that you were taught about learning in school.
What Is Learning?
I guess this is the right question to start with because if we’re going to unlearn what we’ve learned in school, then we first need to understand what is learning and why we might not know how to do it.
To learn something is to understand its essence. To fully comprehend why it is the way that it is.
For example, if we’re talking about business, you should be able to first break business down to its very essence which can be done with a simple formula:
Audience x Offer = $$$$$$Every single business past, present, and future must adhere to this formula. There are no exceptions and when you understand that formula then you can start to gain a better understanding of how business works.
But if you “learn” everything else about business without learning the formula then you don’t truly understand business and therefore you haven’t learned it.
Because how can you understand something if you don’t understand how it works at its most basic level?