What is the secret of learning? How do we learn so much faster, easier and still have fun?

There are three main reasons why we really learn the things we learn and keep remembering what we learned! It’s not the traditional form of repetitive learning that goes on and on and barely lingers in your mind for more than a week or two, if you’re lucky, that means.

Most of us adults learn things for a test and right after the test, just a few hours later or a day or so, we completely forget what we learned. Children, on the other hand, learn best when they are eager to know, when they are having fun, and while challenging themselves.

Many teachers and politicians believe that children learn best when they repeat after a person or a textbook. You could not be more wrong! Children are not parrots. Parrots learn to repeat sounds. Children learn to find the key to knowledge.

You see, knowledge is not something we get by repeating each other. Knowledge is a way in which we structure what we have learned and structure information that can become new knowledge.

The best way to learn is to challenge yourself and your own thoughts or to gain knowledge. You are called to go through a cognitive conflict.

Typically, a conflict is viewed as a negative thing. But when we use our previous knowledge, we see that it is not enough to explain a state or solve a mission, then we have to find new information that can help us to perform a task.

Here are some examples:

A) A person who likes to garden is usually a person who likes to use their hands and body to grow plants or organize a garden. When some plants die, the person goes to find more information about the plant through another person or using books or the Internet. No one had to tell that person to repeat and do exactly the same as the neighbor. Perhaps they share different experiences with each other, but the reasons why a plant dies could be so many and so varied that it would be useless to imitate each other.

B) A person who likes exotic animals has difficulty finding information about them in the original language since these animals cannot be found in that country. But looking for information about these animals in other languages, such as English or for example Portuguese (one of the largest countries with more exotic animals is Brazil, where the spoken language is Portuguese). Without even thinking about it, the animal-loving person begins to learn words and phrases in a totally foreign language just because the information cannot be found, for example, in the Danish or German languages.

C) On the way to Australia, the flight had to make an emergency landing in a small country where hardly anyone speaks its language. You’re hungry, you’re starving, and the airport crew doesn’t understand you. You try to make yourself understood, but you soon recognize some gestures and words that may result in some food for you. There is no dictionary, no translator and you have no idea what language in Google translate you can use to get some food. But by using your phone and recording the voices of restaurant staff, you discover that Google or Bing have voice recognition software that searches the Internet for similar phrases and sounds, and suddenly you learn to use advanced technology when you never have. I thought you would need it. Now is the perfect time to learn about the usefulness of technology. You wouldn’t want to learn about this if you had to do it a month before when all you wanted to do was play your acoustic guitar.

What can be learned from these examples? Well, in the first place, we never end up in the same situation where we were taught to learn in school. Second, there is no identical situation where you learn something and the answer will always be the same. What we have to admit is that no matter what people say, we have to start using our prior knowledge to build new solutions. There’s no better time to invent things than when you’re starving!

Learning things about the things you love gives you pleasure and will not bore you to death. Learning things while having fun will allow you to remember them forever. Cognitive conflicts in our mind are good and make us want to learn more. That is the real reason children learn, not because they simply repeat words or actions. Because, if stone age children had repeated after their parents, we would still be living in the stone age!

So get out there, have fun, and learn a million things! Life will never be better than this!