Learnability is more important than mere Knowledge
Our education system is built for the purpose of providing knowledge. At schools, we feed children with information. We expect them to remember them, and test for the accuracy at exams. In many ways we expect children to become walking encyclopedias.
There is an issue with this model. To understand the repercussions, let’s dig a bit deep into the subject of ‘knowledge’. First, knowledge is easily perishable. Knowledge today becomes invalid tomorrow when new knowledge become available. This is specifically true in the rapidly advancing tech-era today. Just holding knowledge does not guarantee the usefulness of it.
Secondly, knowledge has become a commodity with the availability of internet. Knowledge is freely available at our fingertips at a touch of a button. It’s no longer a differentiator or a competitive advantage. A 15 year old with an internet connection may even outperform a professional with regards to mere knowledge. Today in many ways, there is no practical use of recording the complete encyclopedia in your head.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying knowledge is not important. But it’s crucial that we realize that there are other things such as ‘learnability’ and ‘skillfulness’ that are more important in education.
Learnability
Though related, there is a clear difference between ‘knowledge’ and ‘learnability’. Learnability refers to the ‘ability of acquiring knowledge efficiently and effectively’. In this rapid changing the world, what defines our success is not the things we know, but our ability to learn the new (which is learnability).
Being knowledgable does not imply learnability, but vise versa holds true. One can make a child knowledgable by feeding a ton of knowledge. But still the child may not know to acquire new knowledge independently by herself. This is analogous to the famous saying ‘give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’.
There are many methods for effective and efficient learning. We need to educate our children to practically use such ways to ignite learnability. Some example tactics for learnability are as follows;
— Asking the right question and asking the it right
— Reading, observing, measuring and listening critically
— Learning through creative thinking and experimentation
— Writing, teaching and other ways of organizing knowledge
— Reasoning, analyzing, classifying and systems thinking
— Inferring and interpretation
— Collaboration and clear communication
To keep this post short, I will detail some of these methods at another blog post later.
Skillfulness
Knowledge is useful only when it’s applied. Skillfulness is one’s ability to apply knowledge at situations to solve problems. Simply speaking, knowledge is theoretical and skills are practical. As per my professional experience, the difference between a great and a mediocre career is often determined by the skills possessed by the person, not by the knowledge.
Skills can only be developed through practice. Social skills, teaching skills, management skills or engineering skills, non of this can be mastered through simply gaining knowledge. Getting the hands dirty is the only way to mastery. For example, you can know everything about football, but the only way to be good at the sport is to play and practice often.
Take a look at the workforce in our industry. We have great minds with a lot of knowledge and endless awesome ideas. But how many actually have the courage, focus and skills to implement these ideas? Knowledge does not provide skills and courage, only practicing does.
Therefore in an education system, skills has to be specifically stimulated alongside the knowledge. We must create opportunities for children to pragmatically apply knowledge through scenarios and activities. IgniterSpace way of education is a result of this thinking. At such Makerspaces, children learn technology through hands-on creations, not by attending a lecture.
