I see current education system as one of the biggest missed opportunities of the present day. Historically, it was important that people stored knowledge in their heads, because information sources were rare. One’s work was mostly composed of applying knowledge they absorbed at school / during job training. Today, information is abundant. Work is mostly about identifying relevant information, and coming up with novel ideas. None of this is the main target of our education systems.
So why do we learn? Why do you learn?
Whenever I am learning a new skill, like playing the piano or walking on a slack line, I approach it as 1) a game, a leisure activity that is valuable in itself 2) as an opportunity to learn something about learning. I could watch a couple of intro videos, follow steps from some tutorials and quickly learn to play a song. But will this teach me to really understand the piano? Will this allow me to play any song? A new song? Maybe for areas that have been fully mapped this approach could work, even though it would subtract all the fun for me. But what about areas where nobody was before? How do we learn to explore and learn in places that nobody has been before us?
This is an extremely difficult task, because one spends the whole life in an already explored area, learns things that were already discovered by someone else. And suddenly you arrive to a new territory. You have no idea how to approach it.
What can help is trying to learn something that had already been discovered, but completely by yourself. This task is importantly easier exactly because you know that it is possible. Somebody else has done it before you, so you should be able to do it, too . This is an invaluable information as you can never know whether a goal is reachable in an unknown territory. So knowing that it is makes this task already much easier. But also, it doesn’t provide any clues about how exactly you should reach it, so it’s a convenient training setting for our learning, path-finding skills.
Also, mastering something requires tons of repetition. Compare two approaches:
1) You are told that practicing X 100x a day and Y 50x a day for a year will produce mastery in Z
2) You follow your curiosity about Z and try to make as much progress towards it. You know you can’t do Z yet, but by random tinkering you find out that sometimes you can do Z’ which is in some aspect similar to Z. But not always – it’s just beyond your current skill. So you just try. You fail a lot, but whenever you achieve Z’, this makes you really internally satisfied. You feel joy. Also, along these trials and errors towards mastering Z’, you accidentally discover a more difficult Z”, which is different from Z’, but more similar to Z in some other aspect. As you are approaching mastery in Z’, it’s slowly becoming less interesting to practice it and you naturally shift towards Z”. This keeps your curiosity and the drive to learn high.
Approach 2) just seems inherently more enjoyable and interesting to me. But what’s more important is that 2) teaches you something about the progression of Z’, Z”, …, towards Z. This progression is likely to generalize to other skills, and that means by learning to play Z, you get better at learning other things as well.
Or even more importantly, on the path towards Z you realize Z is in fact not that interesting and that you are drawn more towards something different. Along the progression of Z’, Z”, … you realize these naturally lead you to U, U’, U”, … And these Us can be completely novel.
And this is the beauty of discovery. This is the core of approaching learning playfully. Being driven by curiosity. This is how to learn on your own, for your own.