Learning vs Studying

     “Why is the sky blue?”…“How do airplanes fly?”…I guess that most parents who are reading this would have had these kinds of questions posed to them at some stage of their child’s growing up years. The questions might seem simple but the answers to which they lead to might not be that straightforward. The parent would have been pleased that their child had an inquisitive mind. But do we wonder what happened to that curious mind a few years later?. Do you agree that the questions seem to dry up and the adolescent does not exhibit that same hunger to learn new things unless it involves completing a last minute school project or mugging for their final exams?

For those eager for an explanation on this, it might be disconcerting to know that the conventional education system implemented in schools might be a main factor in diminishing the ‘spark’ found in the young mind. To be more specific, it is the emphasis on studying rather than learning on any subject matter. What is the difference, you may ask. Without getting too technical or relying on definitions per se, studying is when we try to get a particular knowledge by reading, research, reflecting whereas learning can be taken as the superset of studying with even more extensions of understanding what was studied, applying it in a variety of situations, etc. It can be agreed that most students are ‘studying’ these days rather than learning.

The students are not to be blamed fully as the environment in which they are placed ensures this imbalance is maintained. Studying just to get good grades which in turn ensures paper qualification and progressive career development. Even the parents have been led to believe or pressured to ensure their children are moulded like this. Eventually we will hear of these students dropping out of tertiary courses before completion or settling for a work position which is in no way related to what they had studied for in the universities. These malaises naturally occur when the beautiful feeling of gaining new knowledge and grasping its full workings are sacrificed for just “superficial knowing”. With the core issue identified, next course should be the progress to solve and rectify this.

The student will initially equip him or herself with knowledge acquiring skills at home and childhood. This means that the parents have the main role to create a conducive mindset which will be engrained permanently. For example, the parent can explain a science phenomenon by conducting a small experiment masked as a play session. This serves to get the child to get that particular knowledge fully but under the notion that the child is playing. Or when the child hits adolescence, the parent can be a friend who motivates the child as a friend to maybe pursue an extra curriculum activity, like sports related, charity and event organizing, create projects which benefit the community and to develop further from there, just to name a few.

This write up is not to comprehensively detail the specific facts and statistics, nor the countless ideas and ways to be applied to realise that the world is going borderless and global and that knowledge is the only tool to “navigate” in this world. If the world is limitless, it would be naïve to think that all skills needed in it can be confined to a small class. The writer would like to conclude this piece with the below quote. Thank you.

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”
― Albert Einstein

Written by: Paramjothy Paramaselvam for Tuitionprovider.com