learning should be fun

What is the secret of learning? How do we learn much faster, easier and still have fun?

There are three main reasons why we actually learn the things we learn and keep remembering what we learned! It’s not the traditional way of rote learning that goes on and on and barely stays on your mind for a period longer than a week or two, if you’re lucky that means.

Most of us adults learn things for a test and right after the test, just a few hours later or a day or so, we completely forget what we learned. Children, on the other hand, learn best when they are eager to know, when they are having fun and challenging themselves.

Many teachers and politicians believe that children learn better when they repeat after a person or a textbook. You could not be more wrong! Children are not parrots. Parrots learn to repeat sounds. Children learn to find the key to knowledge.

You see, knowledge is not something we get by repeating one after another. Knowledge is a way we structure what we have learned and structure information that can become new knowledge.

The best way to learn is to challenge yourself and your own previous thoughts or knowledge. It is called to submit to a cognitive conflict.

A conflict is usually seen as something negative. But when we use our previous knowledge, we see that it is not enough to explain a state or solve a mission, so we have to find new information that can help us to accomplish a task.

Here are some examples:

A) A person who likes gardening is usually a person who likes to use their hands and body to grow plants or organize a garden. When some plants die, the person looks for more information about the plant from another person or by using books or the Internet. Nobody had to tell that person that he should repeat and do exactly the same thing as the neighbor. They may share different experiences among themselves, but the reasons for a plant to die can be so many and so varied that it would be useless to imitate each other.

B) A person who likes exotic animals has a hard time finding information about them in the original language since these animals cannot be found in that country. But looking for information about these animals in other languages, such as English or, for example, Portuguese (one of the largest countries with the most exotic animals is Brazil, where the spoken language is Portuguese). Without even thinking about it, the animal-loving person begins to learn words and phrases in a totally foreign language just because the information could not be found, for example, in Danish or German.

C) On the way to Australia the flight had to make an emergency landing in a small country where hardly anyone speaks your language. You are hungry, you are starving and the airport crew does not understand you. You try to make yourself understood, but soon you recognize some gestures and words that could result in some food for you. There is no dictionary, there is no translator and you have no idea what language in google translate you can use to get some food. But while using his phone and recording the voices of the restaurant staff, he discovers that Google or Bing has speech recognition software that searches the Internet for similar phrases and sounds, and suddenly learns to use advanced technology when he never had before. I thought you would need it. Now is the perfect time to learn about the usefulness of technology. You wouldn’t want to learn about this if you had to do it a month early, when all you wanted to do was play your acoustic guitar.

What can be learned from these examples? Well, first of all, we never ended up in the same situation that we were taught to learn in school. Second, there is no identical situation in which you learn something and the answer will always be the same. What we have to admit to ourselves is that no matter what people say, we have to start using our prior knowledge to build new solutions. There’s no better time to invent stuff than when you’re starving!

Learning things about the things you love gives you pleasure and won’t bore you to death. Learning things while having fun will allow you to remember them forever. Cognitive conflicts in our minds are good and make us want to learn more. That is the real reason children learn, not because they are just repeating words or actions. Because, if stone age children had repeated after their parents, we would still be living in the stone age!

So go out, have fun and learn a million things! Life will never be better than this!