You Probably Have Many Learning Styles
What I read: The Myth of ‘Learning Styles’ by Olga Khazan in The Atlantic. Published April 11, 2018.
Learning, particularly of the self-education variety, has always been a passion of mine. My father, an esteemed college professor who also ended up excelling in corporate life, placed a book in my hand as soon as he could when I was growing up. Books and what I learned from them are what I most credit for whatever success I have had in life. Reading is one of my preferred learning styles.
However, as the article by Olga Khazan points out, most of us can learn multiple ways. The now ubiquitous learning styles model of education has been repeatedly debunked, yet it lives on. Once something grabs hold in a culture, particularly something that appears to offer a simplistic solution to one of life’s challenges, it sticks.
Sure, you may feel you have a preference for how you take in information: visual; aural; reading/writing; or kinesthetic (physically interacting with what you are learning). That is great if you do have such a preference, but the data thus far does not support that each person has only one primary learning style.
I look to nature often to inform my own perspectives and beliefs. One of the things nature teaches me is diversity. Look at every flower, mountain, tree, animal, or person. No two are alike. None. Yet, we too often cling to notions that we can easily place people into neatly labeled boxes to explain the human experience. Such models are great as structures upon which to hang our thoughts, ideas and facts so we can better grasp them as we cobble them together into a cohesive concept. Models are useful tools, but they are not supposed to be templates that we all wholeheartedly adopt.
In my book, The Art of Self-Education: How to Get a Quality Education for Personal and Professional Success Without Formal Schooling (available in Kindle format only right now – print format someday), I try to foster the mindset that we each learn best in different ways and in different environments because we are all unique. I said this in my book, and I think it clearly demonstrates my view on the subject.
The pressure to conform is all around us. Our friends, families, employers, schools, religions, governments and organizations all take part in this pressure. Sometimes their participation isn't conscious or intentional, but it's pressure nonetheless and succumbing to that pressure is a guaranteed pathway to unhappiness. Remember this, always. You are unique! There is no one on Earth exactly like you.
Our individual uniqueness shouldn't be surprising. As a close friend of mine used to point out, all one must do is look to nature to understand diversity and uniqueness. Look at snowflakes. Look at flowers. Look at trees. Look at mountains. Look at people's faces. They are all 100% unique.
If these externals are unique, why would we think that our insides, our minds and hearts and needs, are the same. They're not. They possess the same uniqueness as everything else in the world. And when it comes to learning and education, our brains turn out to be entirely unique as well. John Medina points out that learning itself results in actual physical changes to the brain that are unique to each individual. Even identical twins that have identical experiences end up with brains wired differently from each other. Our brains, and thus how we learn and what we choose to focus our learning efforts on, are all unique.
Medina makes a strong case for brain individuality. Each of our brains is wired differently. He argues that what each of us does in our lives and what we learn physically changes our brains – literally rewiring our brains so that they function unlike any other. Additionally, Medina explains that the various regions of the brain develop at different rates in each of us. And no two brains store similar information in the same way or in the same place in the brain.
There's no such thing as an average person. An average person does not exist. Each of us is unique and that uniqueness should be celebrated and fostered. When average human characteristics are discussed, what are being discussed are statistical measures that can't really be applied to an individual. How can you average character, bodies, psychology, education, values, ethics, family, social situation, lifestyle and other measures of what make up a person? You can't.
When referencing John Medina, I was taking information from his superb book, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, a book I highly recommend.
My hope is that you no longer buy into the notion that you only learn a certain way. You likely learn in ways across the entire spectrum of learning styles. The important thing is to do some self-assessment and decide for yourself the methods that work best for you.
Maybe you like to learn by reading. Or maybe visual imagery and illustrations solidify your learning. Or maybe you like to write things down or draw them to make learning stick. Or maybe you like to learn certain things by physically doing something that cements the information.
However, the truth is likely that all those methods work for you at various times and with different material. Honor your uniqueness in everything, including the ways you like to learn.
Let me leave you with two quotations by Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D., from his excellent book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.
The future for education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and “deindividuation” but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort.
The current processes of education do not take account of individual learning styles and talents. In that way, they offend the principle of distinctiveness.
If you have never seen Robinson’s TED Talk, Do schools kill creativity?, it is legendary, and it might change your view of education entirely. Check it out.
Thanks for being here. I appreciate your readership. Have a great day.