Here’s a story about the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. A few summers ago, I was spending some days with my family at the beach. One morning, I went to the balcony and found certain relative of mine, not very intelligent, who was very concentrated on a bunch of notes.
Diligently, I asked what she was doing. She had a newspaper in front of her, and she told me she was trying to “get informed”.
I looked at her notes and they were terrible. Those were the days in which Afghanistan, after having the Taliban swept away by the US, was getting prepared to receive Karzai as its new president. This sentence, in one line, summarizes all that she had crammed into a whole page of tiny, obsessive writing. It was really sad to see, in a biologically adult person, such inability to distinguish the essential from the accessory. Every city or location mentioned in the article, every bureaucratic puppet, every eventual spokesman, had their own entry, with the words from the journalist repeated one by one, like some kind of manna that might suddenly make sense at some point.
All the information in the journal had been thoughtlessly treated as being equally relevant. For this relative of mine, “getting informed” meant “eating an elephant, one part at a time”, as a pure exercise of will, without the least connection with one’s own life, and which was very painful to witness. It lacked the least trace of life. Once she finished with the Afghanistan article, she intended to go on and give the same treatment to the whole journal, but luckily she never did, of course.
There is nothing I’d liked more at that moment than being helpful and explain some of these things, but, sorrily, this relative suffers from The Lethal Combination (Ignorance + Arrogance), so I simply got away from that terrace, a bit wiser and sadder, waiting for that way of understanding ‘responsibility’ to die its natural death, which it soon did, and with my head filled with thoughts about the nature of learning and the infinite varieties in human nature.
Learning has to be fun. Not necessarily easy, but fun. Climbing a mountain can be toiling, but you enjoy the exercise, your anticipation of the view, the view once you’re there. You don’t undertake the whole experience only because you feel embarrassed or guilty for not having climbed a mountain yet.
Besides, even when there’s a point to all of that, you always try to get the best tools available. In learning: mnemonic tricks, absurd questions, keyboard shortcuts, visualization techniques, whatever. Those anal notebooks crammed with tiny writing, in one single color could make you hate life, newspapers or even Afghanistan, forever.
I think that’s what most of schools do, most of the time: they extract all joy, fun and creativity from learning (if they do it on purpose or not might open a long debate), and many of its victims never get over it. So maybe some of the things that are crumbling in our days might be benefiting for us. I’d like to think it that way, even if only to finish this post with a positive note.
Do you know any ‘industrial learner’ of this kind? Do you sadly recognize yourself in something of the above?
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Hi Nacho,
I believe learning IS fun, we just were told about responsibility and learning as something we should do, and with it the magic was gone.
This post reminded me of a Chilean song called “Los Momentos” by “Los Blops” (from the 70’s)
“Nos hablaron una vez cuando niños
Cuando la vida se muestra entera
Que el futuro, que cuando grande
Hay murieron ya los momentos
Sembraron así su semilla
Y tuvimos miedo, temblamos y en esto
Se nos fue la vida”
“We were told once when children
When life shows itself
Of the future, of being grown up
There the moments die
They sow their seed
And we were scared, tremble and in this
Our life was gone”
(It’s not the best translation but shows the idea)
I like the “industrial learner” concept; I’ve seen some myself, but fortunately I’m not one of them, actually, I would qualify more in the lazy side of this
Raul
Hey Raúl,
thank you for sharing the beautiful, sad song (I have just listened to it thanks to the magic of Internet). I fully agree with your reflection, and I think we all are curious but some people’s curiosity, as I mention in the post, never recovers from school. Such an institution usually obliges you to learn about the wrong stuff in the wrong moment. I think one should always choose what to learn, otherwise it becomes “duty”, and that’s when fears and the “day of tomorrow” thing come in.
Thanks for sharing.