Learning is humanity’s superpower. It’s, by far, the thing that humans are better at than any other animal on Earth. Cockroaches are probably more adaptable, certain horses have far better endurance than even our best marathoners, and many more animals are stronger, faster, larger, quicker, longer lives, and on and on. The one thing that humanity does better than all other animals is to learn. So much so that the really smart animals still can’t reach the equivalent of a precocious 5 year old. Read my article Learning Is Humanity’s Superpower if you still harbor some doubts. But, there’s a problem with our skill of learning. We don’t seem to know how it works.

If you are anything like me, you are thinking that surely someone mapped out the learning process in detail… right? Unfortunately, no one has done this. In fact, when you do something as simple as look up the definition of learning, you get some rather vague and strange definitions. But, I don’t want to get off on that tangent right now so we will use what I think is the most straightforward definition from the American Heritage Dictionary. Learning is the act, process, or experience of gaining knowledge or skill. We can further define knowledge as that which can be known while a skill is knowledge that can be applied. While these definitions aren’t perfect, they are pretty good and are directionally inline with how these words are used.

I will also state that anything that doesn’t stick in our minds longer than a day, like when we are cramming the night before a test isn’t learning in any appreciable way. And since it’s been shown time and time again that most of the knowledge literally disappears from our mind the moment we turn in the exam, I think it’s safe to say that short term memorization is its own strange skill that really doesn’t figure into our total learning curve. While it certainly has its uses, like when we need to find our keys, it doesn’t accumulate knowledge and skills into our mind over time. I’ve not been able to find anyone that has become a wise and learned human thanks to short term memorization. The knowledge seems to flow out just as fast as it flows in. Our superpower of learning is not the result of remembering what we had for breakfast that morning only to forget it by the time we go to bed.

So far we’ve defined what learning is and what it isn’t, but we still don’t know how learning works. The how of this question is where the water gets really rough. If we type “how learning works” into a search engine all kinds of weird articles begin to pop up. Some articles go down the rabbit hole of the physiological processes in the brain while others start going on about the psychology of learning and so on. ChatGPT thinks that learning is a process of acquisition, encoding, storage, retrieval, reinforcement & feedback, and practice & application. This is nonsensical since acquisition, encoding, storage, and retrieval describe physiological properties while reinforcement and practice are conscious actions that we choose to undertake. And how are those two not the same thing by the way? Also, how does one get feedback without an application? Please believe me when I tell you that the deeper down this rabbit hole you go, the more confused you will become. I spent three years trying to chase this down and got literally nowhere when I followed the advice of the academics that supposedly studied learning. Eventually, I figured it out myself.

When describing the learning process, one must be able to describe literally all examples of learning, not just a handful of classroom experiences. When an infant learns to crawl, the finer points of performing brain surgery, theoretical physics, and everything in between that can be learned must be explained by the learning process. Any explanation of how learning works must be able to describe all of learning or it’s just a possible explanation for an example of learning. But, to do this, one must be able to show that learning has 1st principles. A 1st principle is a universal and unchanging truth about a concept, system, or process that cannot be deduced from other principles. To clarify, I am claiming that learning is a process and that it has 1st principles. In fact, it has six 1st principles.

Awareness is when we realize there’s something to learn. Everyone from small children to grown adults knows the feeling of becoming aware of something that was there the whole time but we hadn’t yet noticed. Short of stumbling into the right technique, like if we just happen to hold a bat the right way, or have abnormally good footwork for our first dance lesson, in order for us to learn, we must become aware that there’s something to learn. We are unlikely to realize that we need to learn anything until we become aware of it.

Second, we need context. Context is the necessary skill to understand what we are supposed to learn. I can tell you that the atomic mass of Dysprosium (Dy) is 162.50. But do you actually have the prior applicable knowledge, aka skills to understand what that means? Do you know that the mass listed on the Periodic Table Of Elements lists the average atomic mass of the relative amounts of the different isotopes of that atom found in nature? Do you know that atomic mass is measured in atomic mass units (AMU)? Do you know that 1 AMU is roughly equal to 1 proton? Do you know that a proton and neutron have almost the same mass with the neutron being just a smidge heavier? As you can see, while you may have had some vague understanding of atomic mass, you likely lacked the context to meaningfully understand what information was being explained by the atomic mass that’s given at the bottom of each element given in the Periodic Table Of Elements. In short, when we lack context, we can’t apply the knowledge we are learning.

The application is when we actually take the knowledge that we are supposed to be learning and apply it. The application is where we use that knowledge in some way that shows we actually understand it to some degree. In the case of Dy having an atomic mass of 162.50, I can tell you that because its atomic number is 66 (that represents the number of protons in the element) the average number of neutrons is approximately 96. Therefore, we can say that there’s a high likelihood that all the naturally occurring isotopes (forms) of this element have more neutrons than protons in its nucleus.

When we apply knowledge, we open ourselves up to feedback. Feedback is what tells us if we were correct in our understanding of the information. Notice that this is different from merely regurgitating the information. Memorization of knowledge doesn’t tell us if it’s correct or if we understand it, only if we memorized it. Applying the knowledge is what will tell us if that knowledge and/or our application of it is correct or not. This is because it gives us something we can cross reference. I can actually look up the different isotopes of Dy. If we swing at a pitch, we get really good feedback on whether or not we made contact and the quality of that contact. Did we like the recipe when we made it? Did I make the basket I was shooting? These examples and a great deal more real world concrete learning examples naturally provide their own feedback. This is a huge part of what makes experiential learning so powerful. But when we learn abstractly, we have to hunt for our feedback. It’s just one reason why experiential learning tends to be superior to abstract learning. The feedback is quite often unavoidable and immediate with experiential learning while it can often be nonexistent with abstract learning.

Now we come to the point where we repeat what we have learned, aka repetition. Repetition is what makes sure that we didn’t get lucky in the first application. It’s also what helps us to better ensure that we will remember what we are learning. We may have gotten a hit at our last at bat, but that doesn’t mean we’ve fully figured out how to hit the ball. That requires a lot of reps. Other skills only require a few reps due to their simplicity, such as adding 1 + 1. And some skills need to be learned to a much higher degree before we can add more applicable knowledge. This is definitely the case for riding a unicycle. We must get really good at riding a unicycle before we can think about doing something else like having a conversation, juggling, or both at the same time. The better we want to get at most anything, the more repetition we generally need.

Finally, we can begin to iterate. Iteration is literally when we build upon what we have learned. Iteration can be used to go deeper upon an existing skill set, like when we learn to read new words or ride a bike in more difficult ways. Iteration can also be used to broaden our skills and knowledge. Once we understand how counting works we are ready to start learning addition and subtraction. We use our understanding of counting as the context for addition and subtraction. Afterall, addition is just counting by whatever number is being added to the current number. And subtraction is the same thing but we count in reverse. Counting is a necessary prerequisite skill for math but our ability to count isn’t improved by learning math. It’s a literal broadening of our skill set surrounding numbers.

For many skills, when we iterate we are often both broadening and deepening our skills at roughly the same time. When we make a new dish we might be cutting up a new vegetable or protein for the first time, which deepens our skill set. We might also be trying a new cooking technique like poaching or smoking, which broadens our skill set.

This is literally every successful process of learning you’ve ever engaged with. Awareness, context, application, feedback, repetition, and iteration make up the 1st principles of learning. Take any one of these 1st principles out and I will show you how learning either halts entirely or turns into a game of memorization that will rarely last longer than the date of the exam that drove us to memorize it in the first place. And you can apply this to literally every instance of learning you want to how infants figure out how to use their hands to a professional musician playing their instrument. It’s all the same process, whether it’s experiential learning that involves all our senses or purely abstract learning.

And the next time that you wonder why our educational system is so broken, why we seem to be getting worse as parents, why teachers, professors, and instructors of all kinds seem to have so much difficulty with what they are teaching then I would float one simple realization that I had some time ago. Much the way all of learning has these 1st principles, we can say that teaching, in any form and/or environment, will always share one common thread. Teaching is the facilitation of learning for one or more persons. That’s it. Whether our teacher is a robot, parent, mentor, professor, boss, colleague, or legendary clown instructor, where there’s effective teaching there will be the facilitation of learning that engages all six of these 1st principles.

Now here is the realization. If practically no one understands the 1st principles of the learning process, then how the Hell do they expect to be good at facilitating that same process? Seriously, can you name any example where we expect someone to be good at facilitating a process we know they don’t understand? I can’t either. So why do we think teachers should be good educators when I promise you that not one in 1000 teachers could name the six 1st principles of learning? While there are a ton of problems with education, this is the one that literally no one talks about because practically no one knows. I hope you will spread the word about this article and help me change that.