Peter Senge on Learning

I realized when I finished my graduate studies that all was just the beginning. I decided to continue to learn myself without going back to school. Learn to understand and redraw my view of the world, thus the I used to call this blog "Just another view of the world" before.

Nonetheless, most of people thought learning as being bookworm, just by reading anywhere and anything. "Learning" is very often thought of as getting high score in exams, repeating the things one read or heard somewhere at the right time, in the right contents, or finding ways to do things that other have thought of more efficiently. Learning in my opinion is not trying to find out what is expected out of me and strive to make it. Learning is not dissecting the issue and building skills to do small parts of it and forgetting the big picture. Sadly enough, I saw people spending a lot of time doing these and still called it "learning" or "studying."

Peter Senge's "The fifth discipline" is one of my favorites. In the book, Peter wrote a part about learning, which clearly makes the distinction between "learning" and "taking in information". The extract below from a couple of places in the book speaks for what I truly believe about learning:

..."learning has lost the its central meaning in contemporary usage. Most of people's eyes glaze over if you talk about "learning"... The word tends to immediately evoke images of sitting passively in classrooms, listening, following directions, and pleasing the teacher by avoiding mistakes. In effect, in everyday use, learning has come to be synonymous with "taking in information." "Yes, I learned all about that at the training yesterday." Yet, taking in information is only distantly related to real learning. It would be nonsensical to say, "I just read a great book about bicycle riding - I've now learned that."

Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning."

Comments

[Long Nguyen]

It's a very true definition of learning, "re-create ourselves". - Long

[Lien Do]

"Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human." I couldn't agree more to that.