Learn — Unlearn — Relearn

Most people approach learning in a different way. If not in terms of how they understand it, they tend to differ in their habits and mannerisms. They think that learning has a lifespan, that it has to, necessarily, reach a logical conclusion. Also, they believe once they are ‘learned’, they become the greatest exponents of knowledge.

In my opinion, learning cannot be imposed. It needs to be experienced.

It is not about just adding knowledge but about removing a part it.

Like any other blog/article or paper on learning would start, I too would start this by asking the most basic, yet the most complicated question.

STAGE 1: LEARNING

WHAT IS LEARNING?

If you aren’t able to think of a response to this question, your first instinct would be to google it.

I’ll make your task easy. According to Wikipedia; Learning is the act of acquiring new, or modifying and reinforcing, existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information.

This definition might sound absolutely correct, covering all the aspects of learning, but can one even begin to understand such the complex process of learning with just that one line? And by reading that line, can one apply the process of learning?

I, myself, have wondered and asked people and have come across very different views. Learning for some is like adding new things to their reservoir of knowledge. Some call it developing one’s skills. For some, it’s just what you do in your school and college. But is that it? Is it that simplified?

What is learning actually?

Well, I’ll leave that for you to think and ponder upon as you read this blog.

To start with I’ll say that learning isn’t a property with an absolute value. It doesn’t have a definitive end point. It doesn’t die or stop. You never reach a stage called ‘learned’. Learning is an ongoing process, every day, every moment. Because learning in the real self is successful if you unlearn the learned and relearn the unlearnt.

Learning in my terminology is evolution. It is the WILLINGNESS TO CHANGE. It only comes with one prerequisite, which is, Passion.

Learning starts with desire. When a child is born, he desires to learn.

When you enter the school you are too young to decipher what you are there for but in all that deciphering and non-deciphering you learn a lot. You are formed by the people around you, by the guidance provided, by your colleagues, friends. Of course, there is this huge baggage of your past and destiny that play a role but still, a lot of ‘who you are’ is a result of your surroundings. You learn personally, professionally, physically, emotionally, mentally, intellectually and spiritually. You fill your reservoir and move ahead.

But it comes with a problem. The problem is that you start thinking that your reservoir is FULL and experienced. You had a bad experience with someone, you form a judgment. You have a nice interaction with a specific type of person (it may be as vague or specific as a person with a particular sun-sign) and you form an opinion. You have learned well what your science teacher taught you and that becomes the last truth. You heard that life teaches you in a certain way and you look for that way throughout. What you forget here is that this is not the end. That what you learned IS NOT THE LAST LESSON LEARNT! Nothing is enough, the best is yet to come and it’ll remain so forever.

Learning happens effectively not when it is superficially done. It has to be done at a deeper level. And the first learning lesson is how to learn.

Learning is indeed surrendering at every stage. It is the ability to give yourself wholly to something. It is the grace of letting go at the right moment of knowing how to let go when the time is right without the fear of letting go of the knowledge you’ve had in the past. Surrender means you are meditating without any ego problems or showing off. We want to be liberated but don’t know that we are blocking ourselves. Talking of learning would be incomplete if you miss out on the teaching of it. They want to teach, but the moment they try you are closed or you don’t want to open. We have so much resistance and the fear to open ourselves. The guide wants to penetrate, to teach, but you are closed. Work, discipline yourself, purify yourself and one day you will see. You are now open to the teachings. There have been so many instances where the teacher has been blamed for not teaching well, for not making you understand, so many times when the result is not up to the mark, the teacher was to be blamed. This can be true for some cases. I hate to admit but mostly the case is the other way round. Were you willing to learn what was being taught? It is the will which defines how well you actually learn.

There comes a point in life when you think that you have enough knowledge and you are ready to face the world when you think that that you are big enough to teach the world without getting their approval. This is the moment you ought to go into your intellect’s keyboard and press UNDO. Because this is a warning sign. That is the point where you should realize that it is the time to UNLEARN what you learned.

Learning is an integral part of development but is followed by two more stages. UNLEARNING and RELEARNING. You learn, unlearn and relearn and that’s how knowledge progresses.

In my opinion, it is this process which makes one alive, which never lets one grow old, which makes one successful. Because success is an act of excellence. If you strive for excellence in whatever you do, success will surely follow you. You can only excel if you are open to knowledge all through your life.

Be it technology, design, emotion, feelings or experiences, everything is learned well only when it’s unlearnt and then re-learned. Alvin Toffler once quoted ‘The illiterate of the future are not those who can’t read/write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn’. The beauty of learning itself lies in how efficiently it can be unlearnt.

Why is it difficult for an adult to learn technology? You may say that there is a cognitive skill dampening with age but then how do some people manage it well?

From an individual to a government, all should be moving towards a constant state of adaption, continuously unlearning old rules, challenging old paradigms and relearning new scenarios.

STAGE 2: UNLEARNING

Once a very bright student from Japan comes to see a Zen master with excitement and pride and says ‘Master. I’ve gone all around the world and studied all religions; I master now all philosophies, the only thing I don’t know is Zen. Teach me everything I don’t know about Zen so that I can become a master myself.’ The master doesn’t respond, instead, he puts an empty teacup in front of the student and starts pouring tea. He doesn’t stop, he keeps on pouring and soon the tea starts spilling on the table. The student got very upset and almost yells at the master. ‘Master stop!! You can’t pour any more tea in it. It’s full.’ Master stops, smiles and says ‘like this cup, your mind is also full. How can I teach you Zen unless you don’t empty your cup.’

Keep on adding and not undo-ing also can do harm to you. You can’t learn faster or better by anyway unless you empty your cup i.e. you unlearn you already know.

Doing something, exploring something and learning something is like a newborn baby. It has to be fresh and should be done with an open mind without a sense of fear. Without the fear of losing something you already know. No knowledge goes wasted. When applied, it always pushes you to the next level; it always teaches you how to grow beyond your saturation. You should just be ready to dive. You should just be ready to surrender. If you don’t surrender you don’t learn. Learning with apprehensions are not learning. Learning with a sense of doubt is also not learning.

Learning is like a sea, if stand on the ground and never enter you will never face the fun of it and if you have entered and try to stand in it you will drown, fun is when you start swimming.

Each person has his own, unique cognitive ecology- knowledge, concepts, experience, schemas, and beliefs. Generally speaking, people don’t let go of the aspects of their cognitive ecology. If a new idea is introduced and it doesn’t fit into their network of concepts easily, then the individual must alter the network of concepts in order to fit in this new idea into it. It’s like having a typical two-story home and saying you want to put an indoor pool in the middle of it-successfully doing so isn’t like just adding a wing onto the house, instead you’d have to take down the entire house and rebuild it using a new design.

Unlearning doesn’t come naturally for beginners. I wouldn’t even say that it is an easy job. Life is like a canvas. It is the only canvas you have but can take infinite refinishing and resurfacing. It can take as many layers and you can remove as many too. But the removal takes a little extra effort and time. Unlearning is the scraping off the paint and retaining some important aspects of it. It actually takes 70% of the efforts. And once this is done correctly, rest is a cake walk.

A five-year-old boy came in contact with a rotary phone and he couldn’t figure out that you had to put his finger in the dial to get the number going. That tells us about ‘conditioned’ behavior. You have to get over conditioned behavior and conditioned learning. Again, it boils down to unlearning old habits and old thinking. This process is actually more difficult than learning. Breaking old habits is the real challenge.

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. — dee hock

Learning and unlearning is not limited to just academics. Learning itself takes place at every level; professional, personal, physical, mental, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. But this learning doesn’t stop.

At a professional level, for instance, if a doctor doesn’t adapt to changing technology, he is left behind. Here your non-willingness and ego become your worst enemies.

A fifty-year-old businessman, extremely successful in his life, reaches a point where he needs to adapt to the new social equations. Instead of adapting to the current trends he gets stuck with his old philosophies and doesn’t move on. Business will definitely reach a dead end for him.

“It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor is the most intelligent, but those most adaptive to change” — Charles Darwin

WHEN DO YOU LEARN TO UNLEARN?

Whenever the context around you changes, you need to unlearn. Whatever you learn and is useful in one context becomes less useful in another context.

If you are a professional, say an engineer or a marketing executive or a business executive, all the tools and techniques that you’ve learned in the last 15–20 years will be less useful in the next 15–20 years. It doesn’t mean that what you’ve learned is wasted.

If you know how to adapt to this reality you can actually be successful, for that you need to unlearn the old paradigms of the 20th century. And then what you’ve learned in the past works acts as your experience.

There is nothing you can’t do or can’t learn in life. If you are a strategist, a researcher or physicist and you are told to write a children’s storybook, don’t think you cannot. It can happen with just unlearning what you learned in terms of the ideologies of working and expressing and then relearning what is required.

It doesn’t come naturally for beginners. I wouldn’t even say that it is an easy job.

The first and foremost rule to unlearn is to be free. Be open. Accept the fact that you are born to evolve and there can be no stage as stagnancy; accept that you can learn from any and every situation. And very importantly, you can develop the ability to adapt.

As long as each one of us is growing and progressing, we experience a sense of satisfaction, a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. Once we stop growing, we start feeling a sense of stagnation and our lives become less satisfying to us. In nature, when something stops moving it is typically getting ready to die. So there is a need for us to adapt and grow.

There is a well-known Chinese proverb that says that the wise adapt themselves to circumstances, as water molds itself to the pitcher.

The more we can unlearn, the more likely we are to experience the sense of growth and progress we so desire. Mostly unlearning means letting go of false beliefs and assumptions that we have formerly used to govern our existence.

Letting go is unlearning. For example, you may believe that someone else is responsible for your own unhappiness; therefore, you believe this other person must change. Oftentimes when we are unhappy, we become obsessed with changing another individual, who we believe is responsible for our condition.

Let go of the mental blocks. When you catch yourself shooting an idea down, take a moment to consider what mental blocks are influencing your behavior. Mental blocks are so automatic that you have to decide intentionally that you want to challenge them

As You Grow By Unlearning, You Flower Into Joy. When you are joyful you are a much happier person. Imagine how much more productive your life would be if you could unlearn many of the beliefs and behaviors that have caused you so much stress. You and your life would be utterly and completely transformed. This would result in an incredible sea change in the way you approach and live your life. In fact, if you can make a concerted effort to unlearn, your life will probably undergo a dramatic and welcome change.

I would talk about my own example. When I joined MIT for post-graduation, I had this huge baggage of engineering on my head. Doing mechanical engineering from a college located in one of the most backward parts of Delhi is not be the most joyful experience, especially if you are one of the few girls in that place.

I was shy in school and thought college would be a break-free from that. But plans are made differently in nature. Breaking free from the shyness was not the most important lesson that I was supposed to learn. Our college had different sorts of people, not many of my kind and I was taught that; bluntly. The problem wasn’t that I was taught bluntly or I learned the harder way. The problem was that I thought I had had the lesson of my life. That this is the ultimate truth and nothing else. That people all over are like that; if not all over, then at least in engineering colleges. My learning there became a judgment, an opinion which was a problem and the most difficult challenge.

So when I entered MIT, I entered with a baggage. A baggage which was hard to move, lift or shift. I met people and started relating and linking them to the old ones. The biggest problem was- They were all engineers. It’s so funny how we start relating human beings to some other human beings who are not even related other than the fact that they have the same qualifications. For the first few months, I tried to maintain as much distance as I could. People thought I was arrogant, I was reserved; but the truth was that I was scared, scared of repeating my mistakes. I could not UNLEARN the learned.

But life was very kind to me. It gave me a chance to interact, to know and to give people a benefit of doubt. And just as I opened — got free, I unlearnt the knowledge that restricted me and stopped me from knowing more people.

If life itself gives you a chance to unlearn, identify and grab it and be thankful because you are one of the lucky ones.

STAGE 3: RE-LEARNING

Unlearning happens when you are open to a new perspective to the things you already know. Relearning happens when you accept a new perspective and appreciate your knowledge from that perspective.

Relearning is the last 30 percent of the learning process and once you’ve crossed the tough part of unlearning. Relearning becomes a natural process. You learn to adapt and learn again.

The trick lies in collaborating/combining/merging and applying.

Unlearning doesn’t mean you forget what you learned and remove it completely from your memory. It is to put the knowledge slightly in one corner and let the room be filled with new learnings. And once this knowledge is filled, there is a need to combine both the learnings and apply it correctly. That is when you are called experienced.

One should not give up any past learning at any stage thinking that it will never be useful. It can always be one’s backbone.

Engineering and design go hand in hand, especially product design. If you are an engineer, you are guided to forget engineering and do design. Once you get the hang of design, you are questioned as an engineer.

It happened with us too and initially, it was the most frustrating experience. It felt as if our guides were having fun. But the real reason was to make us grow and merge the two fields to get a perfect combination.

This too is an ability we need to learn excel because this makes us different from others.

I’ll repeat, Unlearning happens when you are open to a new perspective to the things you already know. Relearning happens when you accept a new perspective and appreciate your knowledge from that perspective. Together they will help you to overcome your misconception and misunderstanding that was there from the time you learned something new.

When we learn something for the first time, we will be focusing to get a bigger and abstracted view of it. We ignore small and important features. After learning something, a small discussion with friends or teaching someone or trying to summarize your learning will make you realize the minute details that you have missed when you learned it.