Ways We Learn

You want to learn?  You want to achieve?  You want to know?  Go to school, say the educators. Sometimes schools feed information and learning; sometimes schools teach how to learn. The how is what you need, and these are most important ways to learn. 

•       First, we learn from reading books or being taught in the classroom. We learn by solving given problems. Practice and repetition, this is the role and scope of all school teaching. Occasionally, inspiration occurs.   
•       Second we learn from examples and experience. Seeing many examples, some working and some not, and knowing why helps. These build our knowledge and intuition of reality.  Knowledge is a pathway to solving problems, while intuition provides a pathway to innovation.  More simply, we learn by doing.  Attending the school of hard knocks is an expression of this. 
•       Third, we learn from mistakes*.  Make no mistake about it; this is a key way we learn.  How many times have you and I learned this or that of what *not* to do, or what doesn’t work.  However, this is the latest in actual academic research**.   An utterly remarkable finding, since everyone who’s done something or anything already knows it. So much for academic adventures.  Some actually do advance knowledge; some merely confirm what we know.
•       Fourth, we learn from success, though sometimes it leads to a sense of unwarranted and unmitigated confidence. Success has several faces, not all good.  One is the super-inflated ego, but more subtle, one can lead us down pathways from which personal recovery may be difficult if not impossible. Success can also lead us to believe we can do things beyond our scope.  

Learning involves a complex of factors not all understood. Indeed, in any situation where there are multiple factors, understanding and learning is more difficult.  This clearly differentiates issues between the human and analytical sciences.

*But there is a caveat.  If one believes in what the outcome should be, the mistake revealed is ignored.  This is an example of the post-truth syndrome, wherein our emotional response contravenes recognition of the actual evidence observed.

**Janet, Metcalfe, Learning from Errors, Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 68:465-489 (Volume publication date January 2017) First published online as a Review in Advance on September 14, 2016 g/10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-