When you scroll through Facebook, you can see posts about simple stretches to relieve back pain, how to make a s’mores, and how to be single and happy. Or if you go on Youtube, you can find gurus talk about makeup tips, or Youtubers teach playing guitar.
But those stretching exercises, the way to make a s’mores, how to be happy being single, how to do a good makeup, and how to play guitar better are things that most people never master doing at the end.
Technology has brought a surplus of information to the world, but it hasn’t made people smarter. The mere exposure to data doesn’t make people better thinkers and learners.
The fact is, most people have never learned how to learn properly.
On average, people spend 50 minutes per day on Facebook alone.1 Being exposed to information is not the same as internalizing and adapting the knowledge. Even during formal education, students acquire knowledge quickly to write papers and take exams; turning what they learn into wisdom that they can apply throughout their lives is uncommon.
The conventional systems of knowledge acquisition fail to make use of the brain’s potential.2Unless we use that information, we’re bound to forget it.
Taking in Knowledge— Then and Now
How to apply knowledge is different today because it’s easy to expose to a lot of information every day. Traditional learning styles often involved apprenticeship or immediate active application of skills.3
If you were trying to learn to ski before the Information Age, you’d likely start by finding an instructor. The experienced skier would help you understand the equipment and act as a guide while you learned the mechanics of the activity. You’d constantly work to apply what you learned by practicing on your own time, the bulk of your learning was done on the slopes. Eventually, you wouldn’t need your instructor, and you’d consider yourself a competent and confident skier.
Today, when you decide that you want to learn to ski, you spend hours perusing the internet for every blog post and article about skiing. You watch videos of people skiing, research the best gear, and join a Facebook group for winter sports enthusiasts.You may feel like an expert in all things ski-related after you dig into these resources, but have you actually learned to ski? There’s a big difference between reading about putting on skis and actually hitting the slopes.
Today, the quality of the knowledge is sacrificed for quantity.
There’s an imbalance between the knowledge we take in and the information that we use.4Human brain is working as quickly as it can to send data from the working memory to the long-term memory, but it can’t retain everything.5
Comments
Post a Comment