There are two barriers to learning — ignorance and the refusal to unlearn
Though I am not very religious, a lot of the symbolism in Indian festivals isn’t lost on me. If you remove the veneer of religion, there are innumerable life lessons to be learned. Festivals also serve as reminders. Today is Saraswati puja that celebrates learning.
When we were younger, our parents would make us keep our books in front of God. Of course, it was symbolic and didn’t reflect on any of my report cards but the festival is meant to instill in us the value of learning and knowledge.
Once we grew up, we didn’t really have books to keep in front of God and I would keep my pen, laptop (this year, it was my podcast mike).
Learning. It’s a lovely word and something most of us stop doing the moment we finish our education. Once we begin working, the whole world becomes our teacher and we imbibe the lessons based on our world views.
There is another amazing word that I have come to love — unlearning.
Not much attention is paid to this.
Just to be sure, knowledge for the sake of knowledge is pointless.
There are two barriers to learning:
a) Ignorance — this is the person who doesn’t know something or chooses not to educate themselves. Ignorance is a choice and it’s extremely hard to change the mind of someone who chooses to remain ignorant. Fear, hubris, arrogance, all are symptoms of ignorance. All of us are ignorant to a certain degree about things we don’t care much about.
b) Unlearning — this is a much bigger challenge. Why? Because this means being forced to confront long-held beliefs and points of view. It means accepting that what you might have thought to be right, isn’t. That you might have to undo a few things, go back to the drawing board, challenge yourself. For me, the last few years of professional life has given me a lot of things to unlearn — how not to treat people, how not to lead, what constitutes success, the stupidity of most titles. Unlearning is like changing the electrical wiring in your house — it involves a lot of rewiring.
We falsely believe that our brains have never-ending expandable memory like hard disks. But this isn’t true. This is why it is extremely tough to hold two conflicting views in your head and go through life as if nothing is amiss.
The smartphone and social media economy have meant we have two things at our fingertips — bountiful knowledge, and bountiful distraction. Of course, distraction is infinitely easier to veer towards. This also means that none of us have any excuse not to learn.
What this boils down to is that ever so often, we need to constantly unlearn and do away with beliefs and knowledge that we have accumulated to make space for newer lessons and better ways of doing things. When we treat whatever we have learned as final or decide that we have learned enough, we narrow down our own path.
Many people are stuck not because they don’t want to learn something new but because they refuse to let go of what they have learned.
Over time, a refusal to unlearn leads to ignorance, where we spend an inordinate amount of time defending an old point of view or a redundant way of operating — things that have outlived their utility.
Without unlearning, there can’t be learning.
