What is the purpose of learning؟

Have you ever contemplated what benefits you received from the 10 to15 or more years you have been in school? Have you asked yourself the question what the return was for the investment of so much time?

Why do we spend so many years in school? Is it because it helps develop social skills and behavior? Or because it keeps young people busy? Or is it just a ritual like the military service that you must pass through in order to become an adult?

Well, some people will claim it is a time for learning, to get prepared for life.  After all, we are supposed to learn for life, not for school!

In this case let us consider what is the factual outcome of all these years “invested in learning.”  You have learned to read and to write, to calculate, to obey, to stay calm and to listen when the teacher speaks.  If you are lucky, you have learned how to work on a PC, to be computer literate.  Of course, you also have learned an enormous amount of “facts” by heart.  This involves the problem that you do not remember them and that most of these facts are obsolete anyway.

You have spent many hundred of hours to learn a foreign language and you know all the rules of the grammar and some words. You are maybe quite good at translation, but you can not communicate.  However, nobody cares, since this is your problem.

The school is the largest bureaucracy man has created.  It is an organization built on the old type of “command and control,” which is based on the military model of organization.

The paradigm of the school is “teaching, repeating – it’s up to you!”  Somebody performs the teaching part following a “curriculum” that was defined by some commission.  The pupils, the students have to listen and to learn it in a way so to be able to report on it as closely as possible to the role model. If they do so, they receive good marks or grades, if not, they will be punished by bad marks or grades. At the end of a period the whole thing will be rehearsed and a diploma will display the results.

This is a very tight control system.  Maybe  we have done away with the physical punishment, but we still have the grading system.  An additional dimension is the competition between the students.  We could say that the main purpose of schools is to teach students how to beat the system and be better than the others.

If you disagree with these somewhat harsh statements, then take the control system away. No more marks and grades, no more diplomas and certificates.  If you do this, the power of the schools and the teachers vanishes.  So would a large part of the students.

I do not know all the answers, but I know some of the questions.  And I know the pain that children and young people are enduring – often together with their parents - because of the school system.

It would be interesting to track school success against success in life.  Anecdotal evidence indicates that many bad learners and even drop-outs have been successful in life and in business.

Why does the school not look at the way adult and executive education works?  Is it because we believe that children and young adults learn in a different way or that they need more command and control?  Or is it because we believe that they are still too far away from real life?  Or is the school too far away from real life?  Have you ever thought about how much of the stuff you have learned in school you really applied in life?

Learning is a discovery process. It leads to a better knowledge of the world around us and should help us to better cope with it.

The teacher should be a facilitator of this discovery process, he should be a resource of knowledge and know-how, he should be a role model.   Unfortunately, most teachers have stopped their discovery process when they discovered the curriculum. They became executors of it and boring routine replaces the joy of discovery.

How much did you learn in school about social behavior, about partnership, about negotiation, about problem solving, about learning?

How many hours were invested into the preparation for parenthood, for coping with difficult situations and crises? 

We always have to live with the same body. We cannot replace it. However,  how much did you learn about health care, about nutrition?  We have only one mind and we live together with other people in a society.  How much did you learn about psychology and sociology?  We spend most of our time in buildings.  How much did you learn about housing?  We spend half of our life working.  How well have you been prepared for your professional life?

Most of us are responsible for children.  How much did you learn about pedagogy?

Did you learn anything about  success, about communication, about partnership?

Did you increase your joy of discovery of our environment?  How many skills have you learned that help you have a happy and successful life.

I know, this article is unfair to all those teachers who genuinely try to prepare their students for life, who are great role models and who never stop their discovery journey.  However, the school is unfair to all young people who are forced to invest their youth into a bureaucratic system far removed from real life.

How different could their life be if schools were a little bit closer to reality?  If schools would follow the paradigm of  executive education, which is “learning, understanding, applying”? This works in management training and  executive education; why should this not work in schools, too?  The “teacher” is the facilitator of learning, the “students” are participants, and the ability to apply is the final test.  Instead of deciding which “stuff” the students have to learn and which exams they have to take to progress to the next level, we should define the knowledge, the know-how, the skills, the abilities and skills the participants should have at the end of a period, and then find out together with the students what the best way would be to get there.

The development of the Internet, and the applications based on it, have led to an array of new learning tools, based on new learning principles and actual content.  We call them “learnware.” Learnware is a product that combines current content, appropriate technology and new learning principles. This is partially captured under the heading of ”e-learning.”

The future development of the internet-related technologies will bring many more application possibilities. New generations of learnware will follow to build completely new learning scenarios. The learning process will be restructured in multiple ways, most of them still unknown to us today.  With “e-learning” and similar concepts we still do just “more of the same” using the Internet. Our way of learning is still very much dominated by the old, traditional, masculine way of work. In the knowledge society and knowledge economy, learning will become as important as work. It may even become paid just like work, because it will be directly linked to the value creation.  Only a fresh view of the learning process can help us find new ways to help people to learn.

Learning depends very much on the context: age, place (school, work, job, etc.), time, previous learning, role models, motivation, alone or with other people, level of knowledge, know-how, experience, etc.

Learning leads to three outcomes:

1.      Be able to know

2.      Be able to do

3.      Be able to explain to others

This leads to a nice overview of learning:

Generic outcome	Specific outcome	Examples
1. Be able to know (apprentice)	·         knowledge ·         know-how ·         skills	-    e.g. history, the rules -          how to cook, recipes -          presentation, negotiation, speak English, etc.
2. Be able to apply (journey man)	·         practices ·         applications	-          driving a car -          developing a business plan, creating a  business plan -          solving problems, building an engine, repairing a car
3. Be able to explain to others (master)	·         teaching ·         coaching ·         facilitating ·         mentoring

We should always ask ourselves the question: “How will the participant cope better with his environment because of the learning process he/she is going through?”

We hope that very soon, schools can really claim that  “we learn for life, not for school. “

There is an array of new initiatives and business ventures, that are focusing on the improvement of the learning process. Just a few examples:

There is the  International Masters In Practicing Management created by Professor Henry Minzberg, who says: “ The MBA trains the wrong people in the wrong ways for the wrong reasons.” (FAST COMPANY, Special Issue, November 2000, page292.)

There is also Learnity, a company that develops and provides learnware for executives. The learnware is based on new learning principles, on business and management principles of the New Economy and the Knowledge Economy and on the latest technology.

There is LearnNow created by Gene Wade, who wants to change the way that poor kids learn and the way that schools drive community economic development.

And there are many other initiatives and business ventures that will help to change the landscape of learning and development.