A Learning Theory From a Learner's Experience

by Don Berg, Founder
Attitutor Services

My learning theory is simple:

Learning is automatic, unconscious, and impossible to avoid.

The question is never whether or not you will learn from a particular experience.

The real question is, "What are you learning from those experiences?"

When adults lament that children are not learning, they are completely missing the point.

The children ARE learning something, it's just not what the adult expected or wanted.

There are three fundamental lessons that every experience teaches, even if we don't realize it:

1. How we manage our own and other peoples behavior
2. What and how we exchange with others to get what we need (which may include the exchange of attention, energy, money, etc.), and
3. The pattern of consciousness that results from living within that power structure (#1) and those exchange processes (#2).

If you want to know what is being learned then you have to first assess the power structure that shapes the relationships between the people in the environment (meaning everyone not just teachers and students), the exchange processes that propel the action within those structures and the patterns of consciousness that result from those dynamics.

Developing methods for this type of analysis would be an important way to apply the insights of this learning theory.

• Education:

  • Honoring The State's Interest In Learning
    How is the State's interest in learning served when parents can be prosecuted for homeschooling? Recent prosecutions indicate that some States are operating under mistaken assumptions about learning.

  • Education Policy For Malia and Sasha Obama
    Should education policy make Malia and Sasha Obama learn in benevolent tyranny or respectful democracy?

  • Definition of Education
    A proper definition of education is NOT the delivery of information, it is cognitive mapping of reliable access to optimal states of mind.

  • Why Is Education Important?
    This exploration of how education, properly understood, provides individual fulfillment, fosters resilience and may ensure our species survival answers the question: Why Is Education Important?

  • Our Education System: What are the Nuts and Bolts?
    Our education system today should make optimal states of mind a higher priority than literacy.

  • The Moral Path of Curriculum: Fulfillment Or Judgment?
    Every curriculum takes the moral path of either fulfillment or judgment, find out how to tell which way you're going.

The link below goes to an excellent summary and overview of the different types of learning theories that exist. I suspect that I fall into the situational/ social category, although my own sense is that these categories are all valuable descriptions of different aspects of learning.

If not, why not?

If so, how does it explain an experience in your own education, or in your teaching?

Share your thought and ideas here!