LEARNING TO LEARN AT A HIGH LEVEL

Learning to think logically will help the learner develop four abilities:

1. participation
2. organization
3. persistence
4. creativity

Memorizing is the lowest form of learning, thinking is the highest.

Learning is the process of achieving competency, awareness, and flexibility.
It requires the use of one or more of the five human senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.

The senses provide information. As a result one learns things in one of three ways:

1. conditioning
2. thinking
3. some combination of conditioning and thinking

Conditioning is defined here as learning things with a maximum of physical and emotional reaction and a minimum of thinking.

A large portion of conditioned learning is unconscious. You don't think about it.

Thinking requires that you observe and understand the order of things (organization), that you actively engage yourself in establishing such organization (participation), and that you stay at it until you achieve a sense of understanding (persistence). Organization, participation, and persistence are key elements in learning by thinking.

You may suppose that conditioned learning, because it involves a minimum of thinking, is not very important. That would not be a good assumption on your part because conditioned learning can have a large effect on how you learn by thinking.

The following examples can show how conditioning can affect one's thinking. If you always read the same newspaper or magazine or the same parts of any publications, these become familiar and comfortable. If you continually listen to a certain kind of music or listen to a particular disc jockey or radio or television commentator, then what they say and play becomes familiar and comfortable to you. Almost anything that's different will be considered strange. But there is a price you may pay for being comfortable. Such familiar surroundings can prevent you from enlarging your point of view and broadening your understanding of other people and other ideas. It can prevent you from learning.

Remembering and memorizing are forms of conditioning. Don't confuse remembering and memorizing with thinking. Memorizing is the act of storing in the mind ideas and information received through one's senses. There are three elements to the memory process:

1. receipt
2. storage
3. retrieval

The process may be described as follows: 

1. Information is received through the senses. 
2. It is then stored for long or short periods of time in the brain. 
3. It is retrieved from the brain, to one degree or another, when the information is to be used.

Although memorizing in-and-of itself is not thinking, it is a fundamental tool in the learning process. We are taught from a young age to develop memorization skills. However, there is a significant difference between memorizing something and learning it. True learning does not occur until we are able to understand information then apply what we believe we have learned to a new situation.