Humans are well known for many things. We are the greatest apex predator the world has ever seen. We have opposable thumbs. We can adapt to more climates than any other species on Earth. We can even light our farts on fire. We are truly without rivals. But what is the real reason that humans have so thoroughly conquered the world?
Our ability to learn isn’t marginally better than others inhabiting this planet, its orders of magnitude greater than even our closest rivals. On par with a superhero’s ability, learning is our superpower. We can contemplate life after death, plan for the future, transcend our senses, and dawn clown costumes with noses that honk, light up, and even change color. And yet, as newborns we are almost entirely blank slates as helpless as a fly in a hurricane. Learning how to fully complete our metamorphosis and why we so often fail to reach our full learning potential all hinges on what I call the skill of learning.
All animals, save human beings, have a large part and often most of their skills from the moment of birth. Nearly all other animals, not including marsupials, can climb, swim, walk, run, and otherwise explore the world within hours or less of being born. But humans can’t even crawl for six months and take roughly a year to learn how to walk poorly. We compensate for this total inability to evade predators and acquire food early in life by being loud and suicidally curious. To say that we are helpless is an understatement. Nearly all other animals have a really large bevy of skills ingrained into their minds and bodies before they even leave the womb, egg, or pouch, but not us. We are helpless idiots. What’s more, our brains don’t fully mature until roughly 25 years after we are born (some requiring an additional decade or more in a special incubation chamber called the basement, but I digress).
From this initial weakness comes our greatest strength. By starting with a Tabula Rasa we are capable of learning any language and the particulars of most any environment along with a truly astonishing array of skills. By starting out as an empty canvas we learn to adapt to the environment regardless of the climate, geography, language, and culture. What capacity other animals have for learning is really designed to happen in more specific environments with hard limits on what they can and can’t learn, but not humans. We can learn to be professional athletes, hunter gatherers, clowns, physicists, doctors, dentists, clowns, electricians, parents, siblings, and even clowns. What we can learn appears to be more limited by our imagination than our biology.
With this tremendous capacity to learn it’s no wonder that learning plays such a pivotal role in our narrative. How we see our lives, the roles we inhabit, and even the meaning of life itself are massively dependent upon what we learn and how well we learn it. Our capacity to learn whatever skills are needed to solve problems our biology couldn’t is breathtaking. And in the case of emergency medicine, it’s also breath giving. Human learning allowed us to shape our own materials and tools, create our own ecosystems we call economies, and even re-engineer life forms specifically designed to better feed us. Say what you will about any of these innovations, the fact that we can do them is a testament to how much more we can learn than other animals. The wolf will never be able to breed a slower fatter rabbit nor can cows grow tastier grass. But we can breed hairless cats and feed them vegan diets in order to… uh… moving on.
With all this incredible complexity, technology, and interconnectedness on a global scale there is one fundamental flaw rotting away at the core of the world’s civilizations today. Well, if we include demographic challenges, maybe there’s two… and I guess social media is posing a few problems as well so we’ll call it five… then there’s the political problems, porn, diet, AI is getting weird… OK, we’ll call it several flaws rotting away humanity’s future. But, there is one that I believe is foundational to all the other problems. The one problem from which nearly all the others problems emerge and/or are supercharged. We don’t understand how learning works!
We don’t understand how humanity’s superpower works. Ask 100 different teachers, professors, and other pedagogical experts why learning is so important, how it works, and what it is and you will get 100 different answers. Ask 100 structural engineers the same why, how and what about suspension bridges and you will get 100 versions of the same answer. The professors of pedagogy, the Ancient Greek word for the method of teaching, invariably gives an answer in the form of a sea of buzzwords, each of which would require further definitions and so on. It almost immediately devolves into academic gobbledygook all the way down.
There is a large class of people in the US, many millions strong, that spend a large part of their jobs and lives teaching in some fashion. Trainers, coaches, managers, teachers, professors, parents, mentors, and legendary clown instructors, just to name a few. The majority of this massive group of people are teaching without understanding how learning works. The foundation of all teaching is to facilitate learning. If someone fails to do this, then whatever they are doing, they aren’t teaching. This means that nearly all the teaching that happens across the country, if not the world, is done by people that, far more often than not, don’t understand the process they are trying to facilitate. And that’s assuming they understand the content.
This doesn’t mean that there are no good teachers, coaches, parents, and so on. Although, the jury is still out on clown instructors. Instead, it shows us why so many people that engage in teaching aren’t any good at it. To facilitate a process that we don’t understand is a universally difficult thing to do well, just ask the clowns. But not to worry, it gets worse.
Our failure to understand humanity’s superpower is the beating heart of what’s breaking our systems down. Everything from misguided political beliefs to college graduates without any meaningful thinking skills aren’t merely the inevitable decline that logically follows the opulence of the Western World’s success. At its core, it’s a failure of learning. It’s a predictable outcome of what happens when our superpower becomes dysfunctional and drained of its own power. As the world we live in becomes more complex our understanding of learning needs to be getting better, not worse. Humanity’s superpower, the very thing that can prepare us for a more complex world, appears to be less understood and more poorly practiced with each passing day.
As our educational systems break down, the people that make claims about how to fix it are talking past each other. Were it not for the well trodden insults and curse words we would wonder if they even spoke the same language. If K-12’s primary purpose isn’t to facilitate learning then it’s an incredibly expensive babysitting service. If academia doesn’t understand the process of learning then why would anyone think they can facilitate it en masse?
As a child who can’t count will fail to learn math, so too will institutions that don’t understand learning fail to educate. And, like any complex system, if we keep trying to fix what we wildly misunderstand, we will only make it worse. As of 2023, 65% of fourth grade American school children could barely read. This is a problem that is affecting more and more of us with the youngest of us being hit the hardest.
Humanity’s ability to survive and thrive, no matter whose definition one uses for this, is almost entirely built upon our skill of learning. Without it, no solution is even possible, let alone optimal. Who we are, who we were, and who we will be is the product of what we’ve learned. This is self-evidently true and will continue to be as long as there are humans. All of human success lives and dies, in large part, as a result of our skill of learning.