Secret #1—Learning is not a passive activity
The first secret to academic success has two parts. The first part involves understanding that learning is not a passive activity. It is easy to see that successful students are people who actively engage with the material they are learning. This engagement may happen on a physical level—such as when a student conducts a science experiment or creates a class presentation—but it can also happen on a mental level. Students who are active learners are more likely to listen attentively during lectures, take more meaningful notes in class, and ask probing questions of their teachers and professors. They are also more likely to connect the information they are learning in their classes to other information they have acquired during their lives.
The second part of this secret is that active learning is not something that some people know how to do but others have to learn. An active approach to learning is something that every single person on this planet is born with. If you carefully observe an infant, you will realize that the infant is always actively working to make meaning of its environment.
From the time we are born we are interacting with environmental stimuli and making sense of that stimuli. We are not sitting around passively waiting to be told about the world. We actively seek to learn about the world we have come to inhabit.
The fact that we are born with both the desire and the ability to learn means that active learning is an innate ability that exists in each and every human on the planet. In other words, every single person on the planet today has within them the capacity to be an active learner.
How then do we explain why certain people eventually take a passive approach to learning? The answer, ironically, is that some individuals have learned that their active pursuit of knowledge and understanding is wrong. They have actually learned to suppress one of their strongest innate drives.
One need not look far beyond traditional schooling to understand how such an outcome has occurred. In many classrooms, children are expected to sit quietly in class, memorize everything the teacher says, and then recite what they remember on a test. But is this really learning? Can students who have been taught in this manner actually make use of the information they have acquired? Education theorists and researchers say no. In fact, years of exposure to such an education does little more than reinforce a passive approach to learning while suppressing any desire to actively engage in one’s learning process, at least in formal academic settings. As a result, people who continually experience a primarily passive form of education may not fully understand how to actively engage their learning in a classroom setting.
Fortunately, active learning is not something we forget. That is why some students who have experienced a passive learning environment may find themselves welcoming the opportunity to become actively involved in their learning when given the chance. But some students—those who have learned that active learning is wrong, that it in fact may be harmful to their well-being—quite often develop a resistance to active learning. This resistance to active learning becomes a block to their academic success.
Typically, a resistance to active learning is not something that students are aware of consciously. That is because this resistance lies in the subconscious regions of the mind, where it can be very difficult to identify. But a sure sign that someone has an aversion to active learning can be seen in the individual’s behavior. Students who have learned to resist active learning will engage in behaviors that actually impede their ability to learn. For instance, these students may avoid coming to class or may create disruptions when they are in class. They do not do their homework. They refuse to engage with the classroom as a community of like-minded peers. These behaviors are done in an effort to avoid the difficult feelings that may arise for them whenever they try to actively engage with the material they are meant to learn.
Because humans are wired to be learning from the time they are born, this resistance to learning is clearly something that has been learned. Typically, a resistance to learning can be linked to a past event during which the individual learned to associate active learning with a threat to either their physical or their emotional well-being.
All of us have memories from the past stored in our subconscious. These memories inform the unique way that each of us makes sense of the world. To understand how this works, consider your response to the smell of apple pie baking in the oven. If even the mention of apple pie evokes a positive feeling in you, this is likely because you have one or more positive memories of eating apple pie. Perhaps you can recall the warmth and love you experienced in your grandmother’s kitchen, where she frequently baked you apple pies. When you smell the apple pie, or even bring the thought of apple pie to your mind, you do not instantly remember all the positive experiences you have had of eating apple pie. Instead, what arises in you first is the feeling that you associate with these memories.
Similarly, people who have repeated or powerful negative experiences with active learning begin to associate the undesirable feelings—fear, humiliation, anxiety—with any opportunity to engage in learning in this way. Though the actual negative experiences may not be readily available to the conscious mind, the feelings associated with the experiences are.
Here’s another very basic example of how this works. Imagine an infant gets hold of a small object and immediately places that object in his mouth. The child’s caretaker becomes frightened and responds by yelling, which in turn frightens the child. Though the caretaker’s response may have been intended to discourage the infant from placing small objects in his mouth, the preverbal child may interpret the yelling as a warning that his life is in danger. Of course the life of an infant who places small objects in his mouth is indeed in danger, which is why caretakers can become frantic when they see this type of behavior. But the infant, whose brain has yet to develop any reasoning ability, lacks the ability to fully grasp the intended lesson and may instead associate the warning cry—your life is in danger—with the impulse to learn, which is probably what the infant was trying to do when he placed the object in his mouth to begin with.
Of course, negative experiences with active learning that can lead to learning resistance are not restricted to early childhood. These experiences can also occur in elementary, middle and high school. Have you ever been reprimanded by a teacher in front of your classmates, all because you were pursuing an internal drive to learn? Or maybe you were humiliated by your classmates for making a rather astute remark that no one else in the room could find relevant. Or maybe you have witnessed these types of things happening to a classmate. These kinds of experiences can contribute to the silencing of the internal, inquisitive, knowledge-seeking voice that exists in each of us. They can teach us that the classroom is not a safe place for this voice. When this lesson turns into a subconscious belief it can later create tremendous turmoil for students who are asked to bring this voice out in the classroom, the very place where they learned it was not safe to exist.
Situations like these leave an imprint on the subconscious memory that links learning to something that is life threatening. If learning evokes a subconscious feeling of fear that your life is in danger, you naturally resist learning. And this may explain why it is so hard for you to become an active learner and succeed in school. You have simply learned to resist learning.
The good news is that if you have learned to resist learning, you can unlearn it as well. As this example demonstrates, resistance to learning is nothing more than a conditioned response to an environmental stimulus.
Fortunately, research has demonstrated that such conditioned responses can be reversed. The tests in Chapter Two of this book are meant to provide you with an opportunity to identify any negative responses you have to learning that are standing in your way of academic success. In Chapter Three of this book you will read exactly how to reverse the negative responses you have identified.