The Joy of Learning Fallacy: How we Inadvertently Hold Back Our Children’s Development

I am sitting with my son. He is 5. Tonight, he is struggling with the abacus. This is part of his enrichment programme to help build his mathematics sense. He can do the mental sums assignments, and does them very well. But he avoids the abacus, because it is new and alien to him. Occasionally, tears fall. There are pleas for rest. I sympathise and empathise. But I refuse. Why?

Because I understand that there is no joy in learning, there is only joy in mastery.

There I said it. If it upsets you, l didn’t intend to. Yet, I think it is going to upset many people who believe ALL learning should be fun and engaging.

Let me be clear, I believe that ALL LEARNING SHOULD BE AS EFFICIENT IN BUILDING MASTERY in the learner as possible. The actual efficiency of the learning process really depends on the affinity with the subject by the learner. As a matter of fact, if you think about it, we are designing learning content to be fun and engaging, because of the very fact that learning (mostly) sucks.

Learning is Fun is Misleading parents (Educators should know better)

Most people would love to visit another country. For a few days. For a few weeks. Way fewer would want to live in another country (by choice). Visiting another country with a tour guide on a package tour means you need to invest as little as possible to explore as much as possible superficially. It is fun. Living in the country involves having to learn how to live (learning the language, getting yourself registered, and most importantly, making it all work). Touch and go is fun. Having to make it work means having to invest more into learning. This is the difference between touring and relocating, and is the same difference between exploring and learning. Then how could we ever confuse the two?

The Learning is Fun School of Thought assumes two statements to be largely true:

1.      Statement 1: All children (and learners) can learn (I Agree)

2.      Statement 2: All children want to learn (Totally disagree)

Statement 2 is false. But because the logic is so seductive, because as parents we would like to avoid passing on the ‘pain’ of our own experiences in learning to our own children. As educators, we reject the ‘to be cruel, to be kind’ approach used on us (aka tough love). So we gravitate to the appealing seduction of ‘fun’, and we want it to be true. And, therefore, anyone who disagrees are ‘killing the passion’ for learning.

I believe in the following statements, and that understanding these statements, would help parents with the confidence in choosing what and how to educate their children:

·        All children love to explore (for a given value of explore - because all children are different). And should be given an opportunity to explore if you can afford. Exploring is not the same as learning.

·        Learning involves taking in positive and negative feedback in order to grow.

·        Mastery is thrilling but the journey to mastery (learning) sometimes suck.

·        All children are differently pre-disposed to mastering different things. But Pre-disposition isn’t destiny.

Before we explore the above statements, it is useful to understand the neural mechanics of learning. So here's my overly-simple version.

The Neuro-mechanics of Learning and Mastery

While an amateur playing a professional uses his eyes to track the ball being served against him, Federer uses his eyes to subconsciously track his opponent’s ‘body language’ when he is beginning his serve, noting micro-things like the rise of the hips, the angle which the shoulder is being rotated to, the height which he hops when he serves …. All are taken in without looking at the ball. This allows Federer to anticipate where the service ball will land, even before his opponent’s racket has made contact with the tennis ball. Just watch the super-slow motion clips on YouTube – just before the ball reaches the apex of the toss – Federer has already made up his mind. His body is already in motion, one leg preparing to favour where he feels the ball will be heading (back-hand or forehand. If you ask Federer how he could predict with such accuracy, he would have to make up some narrative. His 70 bit per second conscious mind cannot explain what his 11.2m bit per second amygdala has worked out.

We think consciously at 70 bits per second. Yet, the brain processes information at 11.2 million bits per second. Day and night. Awake and asleep. To fill up this gap, our brain craves stimuli. It loves to explore. The stimuli that it likes, it rewards and continues to explore. The stimuli that it obviously doesn’t, it avoids. This is exploring. When a new stimulus is experienced, neural patterns are formed. These new neural patterns create new meaning through association (time, sensory feedback, context etc.).

Learning means creating a neural pattern around the stimulus, and reinforcing the neural pattern. As parents (by parents I mean the community of caregivers which includes grandparents, indulgent aunts, jealous siblings etc), we try to hack this system by rewarding behaviors (positive reinforcement) we like and punishing those (negative reinforcement) we don’t (such as sucking toes and thumbs); by giving enough reward signals to the brain we hope to override the sensory gratification mechanism and pavlov our children towards socially acceptable norms.

Learning involves deepening the neural patterns. By deepening and reinforcing the neural pattern, we are making it accessible. The greater the accessibility, the less we need to think to access the behavior, the thought patterns – the faster we get to the outcome. To gain mastery, the brain then identifies the circumstances that the neural pattern is needed and reinforces it to a high level of accessibility (we call this skill). To train the brain to reinforce the neural pattern, we must give the brain as many examples as possible to trigger its pattern recognition capabilities to build up a database of patterns (working memory) so that it can identify when to react to what stimulus.

When it attains a high level of mastery, the speed of access is so fast that the unconscious brain senses the stimuli before it happens, activates the neural patterns faster than human reflexes alone. This is a state of unconscious competence. And when we do something well, our brains give us a positive signal. When we start to do a whole sequence of things well, we start to feel good. This is us hitting 'the zone'.

In summary, mastering a skill or body of knowledge is a process where one creates a NEW (i.e. exploration) stable pattern of neural networks (i.e. learning), reinforcing and growing that pattern (i.e. learning through practice) until mastery is reached.

The key words in that last sentence are reinforcement and growing.

Why Mastery is Scarce

Growing is painful. It acknowledges that there is a target that we have not been able to attain. That there is a gap and that we have to invest even more effort (through developing new patterns, pattern recognition and pattern reinforcement). To the brain this is negative reinforcement. Did I mention that the brain is lazy? (Okay, lazy is not the most accurate word.) The brain would like to take the path of least resistance – Thinking as fast as possible, with least amount of effort. A gap means that the existing neural patterns are insufficient to resolve the task at hand, and we need to ‘grow’ new ones.

This is the ‘hump’. The part of learning that our brain dislikes. Having to invest more. Having to practice more. To be willing to overinvest time, money and personal resources to grow. To reach mastery, requires huge investments. Most children are unwilling to (I mean, in our feel-good narrative societies today, who wants negative feedback); and most parents are unable to afford these investments. (See ROI of learning section below).

In short, mastery is insanely hard work. It requires the development of intangible attributes such as: resilience, strong work ethic, self-confidence, desire to achieve, ability to focus intensely and passion in the skill being mastered. (Traits that, I might add, public schools and many parents are often not the best position to help or teach). These are necessary traits that a child must possess in order to be willing to pay the price for mastery. [I want to point out at this juncture, I am ONLY talking about mastery - not about success in life. Mastery of a skill gives you an advantage in life, but there are other critical skills and competencies that determine success in life.]

Mastery is therefore valuable because it is in scarce supply.

Talent is Not Enough. Why Pre-disposition is not Destiny

In the pantheon of chess greats, there are a great many of them from Russia with names startng with ‘K’: Korchnoi, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramik and …. Kamsky. Of interest to us, is the last – Gata Kamsky. Anyone who thinks that talent is necessary but insufficient should study his life. (And the Polgar sisters) Kamsky, who by all accounts, is an intelligent young man; is not often considered to be a natural chess talent. He had a domineering father who decided early on that his son would be the world chess champion. (well, he started out making his son a world-class pianist, and switched Gata to chess at 8 years) His son’s education and exposure became overwhelmingly focused on chess. Gata Kamsky would make it to the semi-finals without challenging directly for the world crown. But that made him easily among the best 10 chess players in the 1990s. Not born a talent, maybe. But, certainly, a chess great.

Talent can be defined as a pre-disposition to developing and acquiring the neural patterns that a certain skill requires for mastery. (I’ll leave aside the debate on whether this pre-disposition is natural or otherwise, and focus on the fact that the pre-disposition is an advantage). Some children are pre-disposed to logic, like maths and science. Others are pre-disposed to sensing how people can be influenced (EQ). Others are pre-disposed towards sports. Others have better balance. We are gifted differently.

Pre-disposition therefore can explain why some people learn some new things better and faster than others. But it is only the start, no amount of pre-disposition towards a skill or knowledge can give a person the intangible qualities to master that skill. It does make it easier, but it doesn’t make mastery a given. The list I presented earlier is adopted from Hank Haney, one of the world’s golf coaching greats, with a great eye for identifying golfing talent. (He was also Tiger Woods’ swing coach between 2004 and 2010). These six intangible qualities are:

·        Strong Work Ethic: Ability and Desire to put in the hours, sweat to develop new and potentially more effective neural patterns; reinforce them to the point of mastery

·        Self-Confidence: A sense of optimism of the outcome is within one’s control to minimize performance anxiety (allowing unconscious competence to happen, aka ‘in the zone’ )

·        Ability to Focus: Maintaining focus while in the zone is hard work. For skills such as surgery, that may involve operations that last for hours, the ability to relax and refocus is key to stamina. This is tough because focus works the mind and body - requires adrenaline and calories, leading to fatigue and loss for focus.

·        Desire to Achieve: Forward looking with the expectation of pay-off, therefore, increasing the willingness to over-invest more effort. (It is the gut check question – how badly do you want it?)

·        Resilience: Able to absorb negative feedback as a point of learning or ignore it to overcome performance anxiety. (This is the ultimate gut check question – how badly do you want to continue to want it?)

·        Passion[1]: Able to want to do well in the skill (whatever the motivation).

Of the six listed above, the first three are easy to accept. Hard work is what makes you good enough to perform at a high standard. The next 2 are what allows you to win and/or achieve superior results consistently under pressure.

However, the desire to achieve and resilience is driven by negative feedback. It is about defining the successful outcome and the price you are willing to pay for success. It is obtained by constantly putting your ego on the line to see if you were good enough or not. And taking that feedback on board.

Only passion - the final intangible, is driven by positive feedback. That is why competition at the junior level leverage on the joy of mastery. Prizes are given out for successful if minor levels of achievements. Why do we need gamification if joy of learning WILL be its own reward? Because joy of learning is GROSSLY insufficient a drive, a source of incentive for mastery.

Learning is hard as it is. Parents shouldn’t torture and hamstring their children further with half-truth nonsense as learning should be fun.

 Just see the defining clip from Facing the Giants: (5) The Death Crawl scene from Facing the Giants - YouTube

So why torture my son? Well, if you read carefully, I wanted him to develop a strong mathematical sense. A strong mathematical sense is useless in school, but invaluable in developing a sense of logic. Public schools teach you to calculate when they teach you maths, they don’t teach you how to think (critically). Mathematical sense is but one pillar in logic, but this pillar will hopefully teach him to think critically and to know when people are spouting nonsense using pseudo-science and pseudo-maths. I think it starts with the abacus. It is not the only way. But the abacus has an added advantage – it is teaching him resilience at the same time. Resilience means he has get over the hump by himself.

So that he can start building the confidence that comes with the joy of mastery – unassisted.

[1] There is also the it-is-all-about-passion half-truth. And since falsification requires only one null test to demonstrate invalidity – here is my negative example: An elite soldier is ‘passionate’ about soldiering (if we follow the it-is-all-about-passion school). The core of soldiering is legitimised murder or violence. Therefore an elite soldier is passionate about murder.