How I Learn

No two people learn the same way. Embrace your unique learning process.

What I read: “Learning Sideways” by Beth Kephart. Published June 10, 2024.

For many years I wrote regularly on my now deactivated blog site, The Art of Self-Education. In 2014, I gathered, edited, and supplemented those posts into my book, The Art of Self-Education: How to Get a Quality Education for Personal and Professional Success Without Formal Schooling (paid link). How we learn and how we best self-educate has been an enthusiastic interest of mine for a long time.

When I read Beth Kephart’s post, I immediately thought to myself “that’s me!” This is how I learn. This is my individual process. Kephart clearly articulates how I too have learned just about everything in life that's proven useful or meaningful.

I loved Kephart’s post because I too “learns sideways.” Traditional "push" education doesn't work well for me, Instead, I try to "pull" education to me. Here’s how I described it in my book.

A great way to think about self-education is that it relies on a “pull” approach as opposed to a “push” approach. What do I mean by pull and push?

The traditional, industrial model of education would be considered a push approach to education. Educational bodies decide on rigid curricula. Schools administer the knowledge per the curricula. Teachers push the content of the predetermined curricula into the students' brains by all too often minimally effective means. That push approach will continue to wane and be replaced by an increasing number of pull approaches.

Self-education is a pull approach to learning. Rather than have an institution or teacher push knowledge and instruction to them, self-educators pull the needed information and instruction to them. They might do this in a multitude of ways, but the guiding focus is that the learner directs what they want to learn and pulls the knowledge or instruction to them to construct a more personalized learning path than one delivered by pushing to students.

I learn best solo when I can. I learn in odd steps and not always according to an assumed learning progression. My learning sources are from all sorts of places that jumble inside my head as I work out the learning I want to take place.

I figured out quite young how to get through traditional schooling by learning this way – sideways as Kephart puts it. I pretended it was mostly the teachers who taught me what I learned. Many of them were excellent teachers and I certainly utilized the resources they exposed me to, but most of my learning process was to do the learning alone. My process mirrors Kephart’s to a significant extent.

I am a dogged autodidact, stuck inside my hapless ways. My artist husband knows to leave me alone—to offer encouragement but no rules, to say, occasionally, You know there is a color wheel, to allow me to shrug off that news. I will learn color on my own, the proper angle of an X-Acto blade, proportions, positives/negatives, the journal stitch, the weights of papers. I will buy how-to books but will fail at the instructions. I will watch YouTubes in utter exasperation. I will toss the poorly coptic-stitched book across the room, wipe away the tears, rise, take all the stitches out, and try again, because through all these years of learning lonesome, learning sideways, I refuse to be defeated. I will not allow whatever is different in my brain—the chemistry of anxiety, an undiagnosed faultiness in my wiring—to thwart what I desire.

Luckily, my father encouraged my self-education efforts. Despite him having a PhD and being a college professor teaching graduate students, he would constantly tell me that most education takes place alone or sometimes in small groups. He respected formal schooling, but he was under no illusion that his efforts magically pushed learning into the students’ heads. Rather, he knew he was a learning facilitator and that the bulk of the learning happened when the motivated students were alone with themselves.

If you learn in unique ways, I hope you won’t disregard whatever process you utilize because it doesn’t match a preconceived idea of how education is “supposed” to look and function.

Learning is the ultimate goal. However you do that best is the correct way to do it for you. Embrace your uniqueness in all things, including how you learn.

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