Learning is a Process of Upsetting the Status Quo

On a cellular level, learning something new requires growing new nerve cells along with the connectivity between them. In other words, learning always means replacing the status quo with something else.

As a little boy, it was self-evident that tiny people somehow got inside our television set or that there was another child inside the mirror who delighted in imitating me. As a species it was once self-evident that the sun revolved around the earth, that life could arise spontaneously from non-living matter, and that lightening was caused by angry gods.

What learning does, for the individual as well as for society as a whole, is change the order of things. And change can be frightening. It can be unsettling, even terrifying, to recognize that what we know is not definitive. It can also, sometimes even simultaneously, delight and awe us as we find ourselves privileged to see the old world in a new way.

We typically think of education as a process of moving from ignorance to knowledge, that we build learning from the foundations up, like a constructing a house. But it is really more like an unveiling, a lifting up of the curtain of ignorance to see behind it, first from this angle, then from that. Each peek shows us a new perspective on truth, one that doesn't negate what we once thought we knew, but rather adds to it, just as our brain adds neurons and connections as it learns.

Every now and then, we see things from a perspective that causes a revolution in our thinking, like when a child realizes, That's me in the mirror, or when Einstein recognized the theory of relativity by imagining himself on a beam of light. We call it epiphany and from that moment on, everything has changed. The status quo is no more. Long live the status quo.

As adults, those moments tend to be rare unless we go out of our way to seek them out, to become curious about things that may at first seem to have no apparent connection our status quo life. This is why we tend to become hideabound and jaded, sometimes to the point that we simply cannot, or refuse to, even consider new perspectives because we know it all. For young children, however, these moments of epiphany come fast and furious as they encounter so much for the first time. It's their openness, their curiosity, their willingness to have their status quo upset, that makes us declare that their minds are "sponges." Indeed, for young children, each day can bring a new ephipany.

Too often, we adults, seeing their capacity for learning, decide we must take advantage of these young brains growing all those new neurons and connections by striving to somehow cram as much in there as possible. I'm thinking here, of course, of the increasing academic-ization of preschool and kindergarten. When we do this, we show our own ignorance of how humans have evolved to learn, stripping the process of curiosity and replacing it with the far weaker external motivators of rewards and punishment. The result is that children become as hidebound and jaded as adults because it's just status quo all the time.

When we allow curiosity to lead, as we do in play-based settings, we lay the groundwork for epiphany. "We consciously take in . . . new experiential data," writes cognitive psychologist and author Christine Caldwell, "and if we feel sufficiently drawn to it (i.e., curious about it) or emotionally invested in it, we will commit this new experience to memory, which is another way of saying that we just learned something. This also explains why we have difficulty learning things we don't care about."

Caldwell goes on to say, "If learning is an act of upsetting the status quo, then, it stands to reason, that conflict is essential to learning. Collaboration is a conflict of ideas."

And this is the vital second piece of what makes play-based learning, or self-directed learning, the gold standard. The ultimate way we access new perspectives is through other people. Playing with others teaches us how to live in a world of conflicting perspectives, to collaborate, and that is why I often say that "together we're a genius."

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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