How to learn, unlearn, and relearn? For students

 

STARTING

Growing you

How to learn, unlearn, and relearn?

Unlearn: To discard (something learned, especially false or outdated information) from one's memory. Relearn: To learn (something) again. The world we are living in is fast and dynamic, where change remains the only constant thing. So, to change, what is important is the attitude to learn.

Alvin Toffler is credited for saying: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn".  A new year often heralds a host of exciting changes: resolutions, renewed hope, and, most importantly, new opportunities to learn. Few things excite us more than lifelong learning. However, the global lockdown outlook has made us to rethink. While they say you learn something new every day, if current trends continue, the post lockdown might be the era of unlearning.

For many of us, this will sound immediately counterintuitive. Unlearning. It just feels wrong. After all, most people have been conditioned to value continuous, ‘acquisitive’ learning. We yearn for new information, and rightly cherish that knowledge when it comes along. If you’ve worked hard to learn something, why would you want to unlearn it?

The answer is quite simple. Although we probably all know of someone who think they know all but nobody knows everything. The human brain has a finite capacity. In overly simplistic terms, to make room to learn something new, you’ll usually have to discard some older, outdated information.

Take a step back and you’ll begin to realise how valuable unlearning can be. You’re doing it all the time — probably without even realising it. That’s just the nature of a changing world. Think of it as a software update. Your devices need constant updates, so why wouldn’t your knowledge?

So, it helps to stay out of the old and in with the new this era. What is the learn, unlearn, relearn cycle? 

Getting used to unlearning

While at a first glance, the idea of unlearning may not feel right, it isn’t as scary as it sounds. To get a common misconception out of the way, unlearning doesn’t mean dumbing things down or tossing out knowledge for no reason. Rather, it allows you to make room for more relevant, up-to-date information.

Sometimes, you’ll unlearn little things. For example, you probably grew up learning that Pluto is a planet. Then, suddenly, you had to unlearn that, because it was no longer a planet. That’s just one of many examples. You may move countries and unlearn local customs, like driving on a certain side of the road. Maybe as a child, you were told that eating carrots will help you see in the dark, only to find out later in life that isn’t true (no matter how many carrots you eat).

You can also unlearn and relearn new skills, like how to cope with working from home instead of working in the office, or how to best optimise SEO since Google updated their algorithm.

Other times, unlearning can mean updating your beliefs and values to be more tolerant, diverse, and inclusive when presented with new information or a new perspective.

Far from throwing away hard-earned knowledge for no reason, unlearning represents a healthy, natural, and necessary step in the learning process: being open to different perspectives and willing to update your belief when presented with new information that challenges previously held conceptions.

Just think, if humans weren’t in the business of unlearning, relearning and continuously updating knowledge, we’d still believe the earth is flat, leeches are a medicinal miracle and tomatoes are evil and poisonous. 

What is the learn, unlearn, relearn cycle?

As mentioned, the process of unlearning and relearning has been around as long as humans have been learning. They go hand in hand. However, the formal idea of a cycle of learning, unlearning, and relearning was popularised by American writer and futurist Alvin Toffler, who posted that “by instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education…Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.” 

At its core, the learn, unlearn, relearn cycle is self-explanatory. The name isn’t a trick, it’s exactly what it sounds like. For example, you may learn how to use an everyday communication tool like Gmail. Over time, you get used to the layout and interface. This is a skill you have learned. You might even consider yourself an expert. Then, one day, Gmail updates their interface. As a result, you will have to unlearn the old layout and relearn the new one, to ensure your skills remain current and relevant in a changing world.

In this era of unprecedented change and copious ‘new normal’, you probably had to unlearn a lot. This can be challenging because many of us have been taught to practice ‘acquisitive’ learning. That is, constantly acquiring new knowledge, piling facts one on top of another. In contrast, the learn, unlearn, relearn cycle engages more critical thinking skills, encouraging you to continually analyse, evaluate and challenge knowledge to ensure it is relevant and up to date.

In simple terms, our ability to unlearn and relearn comes down to neuroplasticity — the foundation of a growth mindset. According to Very Well Mind, “The human brain is composed of approximately 86 billion neurons. Early researchers believed that neurogenesis, or the creation of new neurons, stopped shortly after birth. Today, it's understood that the brain possesses the remarkable capacity to reorganise pathways, create new connections, and, in some cases, even create new neurons—a concept called neuroplasticity, or brain plasticity.”

As with most things, this ability becomes easier with practice, so there’s no better time to start training your brain to learn, unlearn, and relearn than now.

Unlearning for Learning and Development (L&D): changing values for a changing world

While the learn, unlearn, relearn cycle has been important for a long time, its relevance has accelerated in recent years. As such, 2021 looms as the year of unlearning and relearning. This is especially true for L&D practitioners. It’s safe to say that from 2021 onwards, those who are unwilling to continually unlearn and relearn are at risk of being left behind.

Why is adopting the learn, unlearn, relearn cycle so important?

Implementing and embracing these changes in the way we live will require a significant amount of unlearning and relearning. It is no longer enough to say you know something and assume that knowledge will remain constant for the next twenty years. Rather, you must continually re-evaluate knowledge and relearn skills to ensure they remain up to date in a changing world.

Every day we learn new things. This has become more than ever an absolute necessity to adapt to the fast-changing, dynamic global environment characterised by a high level of uncertainty, insecurity, and change. Our school and university system are a key contributor to the learning our culture in our society and, of course. We don’t only need pure knowledge today but also, to a decisive extent, to also develop today our capacity of discovery, invention, experimentation, and adaptability. In order not to be left behind by the rapid technical development of our society, we also have the enormous task of unlearning and relearning. The decay value of our knowledge has shrunk disproportionately in comparison to earlier generations.

Therefore, we have the enormous task of also learning to unlearn and relearn in order to constantly adapt. Our capacity for learning, unlearning, and relearning is essential to scope with our fast-changing technology-driven world: What worked for me yesterday may not work for me today and we don’t have the luxury to get complacent.

Learning and biases. The concept of education as an exercise only at the beginning of your life during school and university will be over. The future of our education system will be more diverse, and the future generations will take several breaks of education for constant learning opportunities. Ben Schiller predicts even the new profession of “un-schooling counsellors” who will guide our learning journey through our career and whole life.

Even if this seems evident that learning is in high demand to keep up to date with the race of the fast-changing environment driven by the rapid technical evolution and even if we are motivated to take on this daunting task, we are confronted to some major hurdles: We are more subject to our biases and prejudices than we might realise. And these biases play an important role in coping with the enormous wave of information that overtakes us every day. The human mind do an outstanding effort to withstand this flood of information. We are confronted by a volume of 34 Gigabytes of information per day through mobile phones, online entertainment services, the Internet, electronic mail, television, radio, Up, books, social media etc. and we receive about 105,000 words or 23 words per second every day. In order to deal effectively with this flood of information, we unconsciously and unintentionally use filter mechanisms such as the confirmation bias. The confirmation bias helps us to process information by looking for and interpreting, information that is consistent with our existing beliefs. This helps us in our decision making but this often results in ignoring inconsistent information. The task here is to consciously switch off our autopilot thinking at times and to question seemingly clear circumstances more deeply, reflect on and logically making more conscious decisions.

Unlearning and relearning. Unlearning is not about forgetting what we know, but it’s rather the ability to choose an alternative mental model in which we operate. If we want to learn and grow steadily, we have to step out of our often-unconscious mental models. We have to get over the old convictions and embrace new information which doesn’t always fit into our existing thought pattern. All the learning we do, involves unlearning since we have to question our existing belief, create new connections in different contexts and re-sort knowledge by matching, combining and structuring new facts with our existing knowledge.

Edward Hess underlines the fact that “All learning occurs in conversations with yourself (deep reflections) or with others”. That means, only in being confronted with other opinions and engaging in these meaningful conversations we can understand different ways of thinking and change or adapt it to our mental models. The more we are able to unlearn, the more likely we can learn and grow. Learning new things is impossible without unlearning.