About Learning to Learn
How to design an institution where students learn how to learn? One would hope there may an easy formula somewhere, but the 'institution' gets in the way: Within an institutional setting, learning is often about how to master the institutional system and not about opening up to other possibilities. Within an institution, the rhetorical often trumps the philosophical. Yet this dependence on rhetoric is perhaps a fatal flaw when social changes dislocate the institutional position. A rhetoric-bound institution, one that champions the skills of mastering its own system, can quickly become out of sync with everything else: No wonder employers today complain that the universities don't speak their language! Learning to learn, in more ways than one, is a philosophical exercise. It is a dialogue with oneself, rather than pursuit of intellectual superiority, and often achieved through learning things one would later discard (like understanding Newtonian physics at the ...