Learning to Learn





We are born to learn, so how do we learn to learn. Learning begins even before
we are born. Learning to learn in order to take advantage of our new cyber-
assisted world isn’t really learning to learn but learning new skills that I
call cognitive enabling skills.

Yesterday I wrote about higher order cognitive enabling skills. These are the
skills that we are all supposed to learn while we are in higher education but,
for whatever reason, we were never taught them. Things like critical thinking,
complex reasoning, metacognition, higher order creativity. All higher order
cognitive skills that we should be taught but are not.

What do these higher order cognitive enabling skills have to do with learning
to learn? These are the kind of skills that are not yet, and I don’t believe
will ever be automated. These are the thinking skills that make us uniquely
human.

What is an enabling skill? An enabling skill is a skill that enables you to
take information, turn it into knowledge (internalized information), and then
transform it into understanding (deep or otherwise). When it comes to
learning, if we are missing cognitive enabling skills or attributes, we are at
a learning disadvantage when compared to others with these skills. All right,
so now I have introduced attributes as well. What are all of these skills and
attributes that I am talking about and why are they important?

If we are born with a reasonable amount of cognitive processing ability, we
can learn all of these enabling skills – to a greater or lesser extent. The
first cognitive enabling attributes are not learned, but come pre-packaged at
birth – unless a person is born with a developmental disability. The first of
these fundamental enabling attributes comprise our sensory input. In order to
fully learn, we need to be able to sense the world around us. Ideally, we can
see, hear, touch and smell the world around us. Sometimes people are missing
some of these basic attributes either through a developmental disability or an
accident. However, for the vast majority of people the basic sensory inputs
are the first of the cognitive enabling attributes. We learn through our
senses. Anyone who is missing one of these attributes will tell you that they
are at a disadvantage when it comes to learning, but millions of people
missing one or more of the sensory inputs learn to cope just fine. It is more
work, but it is done all the time.

A number of other cognitive enabling skills emerge, at least in a rudimentary
form, through normal development. The first, and most important of these
cognitive enabling skills is the learning of language. Not just learning a
language but learning about language first. Building on the ability that
language endows us with, our early cognitive development provides us with the
basics of logic, reason, and rational thinking. These skills help us
understand the world around us, communicate with each other, and assist us in
learning in our earliest years. Our basic sensory attributes and rudimentary
enabling cognitive skills provide us with the capacity to learn and adapt to
our surroundings. These skills make normally developing children resilient and
adaptable. However, there is a major learning leap when we begin to formally
teach more advanced cognitive enabling skills.

The most basic and fundamental advanced cognitive enabling skills are reading,
writing, and numeracy. Acquiring these skills increases our rate of learning
in an exponential fashion. Children who fail to properly gain these skills,
for whatever reason, are seriously disadvantaged. Many go on to be
marginalized in our society and fail to learn anywhere near their natural
potential. As I study education at a primary school level, where most of the
skills are acquired, I despair at the lack of understanding of how people
learn by those charged with teaching these basic cognitive enabling skills.
Science tells how people learn and we could do so much better – but we don’t.
Anyway, that is another topic that I have written volumes about, so I’ll try
to stay focussed.

These basic cognitive enabling skills are basic skills and would not be
considered stuff. These skills are used to learn stuff (content). Children
learn a great deal through reading and writing and being able to practice
basic numeracy skills. However, these enabling skills are not really a subject
to be studied in and of themselves – except for academic interest. These are
skills that are learned and then the application of these skills leads to an
explosion of learning stuff.

After these basic enabling skills have been acquired, formal education begins
a shift away from cognitive enabling skill acquisition and development to
learning about the world around us. Much of this education takes the form of
memorizing the “right answer” and then regurgitating what has been committed
to memory as a measurement exercise to see how well some bit of content has
been memorized. In fact, there are very few students who complete even
postgraduate education who acquire a usable full suite of other, higher order
cognitive enabling skills.

These other, higher order cognitive enabling skills require significant
frontal lobe myelination before they can be learned. These skills require the
manipulation of complex abstract concepts. All of the cognitive enabling
skills require abstract processing, but the basic cognitive enablers require
less abstraction than the higher order enablers. Reading, writing, and basic
numeracy, as cognitive enablers, require the ability to manipulate abstract
symbols and concepts to represent concrete, tangible objects and concepts.
Higher order cognitive enablers allow us to understand and manipulate abstract
conceptualizations that may never be more than abstract, at least in a way
that we can understand. Being able to predict the full effects on an
organization of a cultural change in a management team is an extremely
abstract task. Because of the general lack of these higher order enablers, the
phrase, “Well, we never really thought of that…” is heard far too often.

So, what is learning to learn? It is simply the acquisition of the higher
order cognitive enablers. Just as someone employed in the cognitive services
sector (lawyers, accountants, administrators, managers…) would be seriously
handicapped if they lacked the basic cognitive enablers (reading, writing,
basic numeracy…), in tomorrow’s world the lack of higher order cognitive
enablers will be the handicap.

If a cognitive services professional were to face the prospect of learning a
complicated, new way of carrying out their job without the abilities
encompassed by the basic cognitive enablers (speaking, reading, writing, or
basic numeracy) the challenges would be all but insurmountable. There are some
who can accomplish it (think of a blind lawyer), but they are the exception
rather than the rule and stand apart as someone with extraordinary
determination and persistence. These basic cognitive enablers have served us
well and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. You could say that
our very civilization has been built on them.

You could say that, except that, although the higher order cognitive enablers
are rare, some people do have them and regularly use them. Arum and Roksa tell
us that about 10% of university graduates have these higher order enablers and
regularly use them. Another 50% of university and college graduates can
demonstrate that they have some of these skills but their use is restricted,
because of the problem of transference in learning, to the narrow fields of
study that they graduate from. I would suggest that although the fundamental
cognitive enablers have had an unimaginable impact on the development of our
society, the higher order cognitive enablers, such as critical thinking or
higher order creativity, have been the real catalysts of change and progress.

So, learning to learn simply requires the acquisition of these higher order
cognitive enablers. Remember, simple does not mean easy, just simple.

The acquisition of these higher order skills is just as hard as the
acquisition of our fundamental cognitive enablers. Don’t misjudge the
difficulty in learning to read or write. Learning a second language pales in
comparison to learning the whole process of understanding and producing
language for the first time.

This is why teaching of these higher order cognitive enablers has all but
disappeared. They are difficult to learn and difficult to measure if they have
been learned. It is much easier to measure how well someone has memorized a
right answer and regurgitated it when tested – even if it is measured by an
open-ended essay.

The science of learning tells us how they can be taught. It isn’t that
difficult to teach higher order cognitive enablers. The problem lies in what a
senior administrative colleague said to me as we were discussing this one-day.
He said,” You forget our unwritten agreement with the students. We don’t ask
too much of them and they won’t ask too much of us.”

In the world where learning will play a central role in our ability to
contribute to society, the learning won’t entail memorizing the elements of
the periodic table. The learning that we will be expected to do will entail
fundamentally restructuring our understanding of the way we do things – again
and again and again. Although we will use the basic cognitive enablers, our
very real success will depend on our proficiency with the higher order
cognitive enablers, the higher order thinking skills that are so lacking in
our society today.

None of these cognitive enabling skills are directly marketable. No one was
ever hired because he or she could read, although there have been many who
were not hired because they couldn’t read – being able to read is central to
almost every cognitive services task.

Acquiring more cognitive enablers is learning to learn. We can teach enablers
and we can learn enablers. All we have to do is decide to do it.