Everyone Knows How to Learn

People often talk about how their preferred educational method (be that traditional schooling, homeschooling, or unschooling) teaches children "how to learn."

With unschooling, children learn how to learn, I've heard more than once.

I appreciate the sentiment, but it doesn't really sit right with me. Mostly because it seems to be minimizing the natural drive humans have to learn and explore and create. It's taking away from something I believe to be innate, by making it something external that has to be done to children. Even with the gentler "learning how to learn" version, it still seems to imply that this learning must be sought from some external source.

If this were the case, I don't think people would learn to walk or talk, interact positively with others, or any of those other things that babies and small children manage just fine long before they've had a chance to learn how to learn. They manage to learn anyway.

Children are greatly helped in learning by having older people who model behaviour and skills, cheer them on, expose them to new things, and otherwise provide helpful support. But the learning itself, they already know how to do.

"Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners." John Holt

It's important to acknowledge that there are things you can learn that will greatly help with your learning. These things might include:

• How to research efficiently and organize your research
• How to set and achieve goals
• When to quit things and how to go about doing so
• How to approach people with requests for teaching or mentorship
• How to organize a group, club, or event
• How to adapt when things aren't going to plan
• How to look critically at media, books, etc.

All of these things can help in your educational journey. But none of them are what I would call learning how to learn. Perhaps just learning to better organize, plan, and execute your learning, especially when you want to be pursuing things in a more structured way or achieving some big goal. Important skills, yes, but not vital to learning and growing.

So yes, there are lots of things people can learn. Things that are learned for their own sake, skills that are learned to help with learning, things that are learned to achieve some specific goal...

But all that learning we're able to do because we're born knowing how to learn. It's a legacy of our species, and it's what makes unschooling so great. We just need to embrace it, encourage it, and watch the amazing things that happen.