Discussion

What skills should adults have? Most important thinking space skills for adult life cover the entire spectrum of possible functioning from practical right out to interpersonal and cognitive. Financial literacy — or the ability to navigate income, spending, saving and the debt landscape fairly — is one of the highest-impact skills that remains largely undeveloped in adult populations throughout life with implications for stability and wellbeing in adulthood. You are reading — Communication skills — written and verbal, as well as the ability to listen twice as much as you speak — is fundamental in almost all walks of adult life. In an information-saturated environment rife with competing truth claims of wildly variable quality, critical thinking and evaluation of information are becoming more important than ever. How well you can do emotional regulation, and use interpersonal empathy — that is, how much you are able but also willing to work with your own responses and perceptions in a way which attends genuinely to others — forms the basis of what makes up every important adult relationship. And adaptability, the ability to approach knowledge with an open mind and learn constantly as contexts (and needs) change may be the most crucial skill of all in a world where prospects and requirements are changing at lightning speed.

Q2: What incentivise people to learn new things? For most sustainable motivation to learn, new learning or skills is linked to genuine personal relevance — that the subject has intrinsic meaning: If one recognizes what his/her/their learning serves purpose and sees application in it because there genuinely care about that which they are leaning, that takes a duty that may seem an externally pushed path-to- lesser internally driven pursuit. Curiosity awakens, once awakened it is able to feed itself — the best learning experiences are ones that light a fire of real curiosity rather than just providing information. Additionally, learning is a social activity, so studying with other individuals who are truly passionate about the same subject generates community accountability and that competitive energy which drives rapid and individual progress. Early successful experience – however minimal – gives you the neurological reward signal that reinforces further action, which is why an appropriate sequence of easy to hard progression is such a crucial educational device for keeping your motivational momentum in the face of the inevitable struggles of actual learning.

What is there to teach which teachers and parents can give children? The two most dominant educational relationships for most kids are with teachers or parents, and the contributions made by each are generally not overlapping. The core emotional and moral basics that make up character come from parents — modelled behaviour, consistent values, unconditional regard, the domestic knowledge necessary for practical autonomy. You learn all the patience, honesty, resilience and care for others through the kind of parental relation you had more than any lesson. Teachers bring the organized knowledge, breadth of disciplinary scope and intellectual rigor that home is unlikely to provide in a systematic way — familiarizing children with academic disciplines, helping them learn how to learn in formal settings while also being the first real adults beyond parental control that students connect with whose judgment and evaluation are important for the young learners’ emerging identity as capable individuals.

Which skill(s) did you want to master? Here are a couple of skills I regret not developing earlier or more methodically. An additional language — namely French — is something I have hoped to pursue somewhat half-heartedly for several years and should resolve to do more seriously. Another is mastery of a musical instrument — I have such an appreciation for music without any actual musical ability (having neither practiced seriously while it would have been the most neurologically accessible, nor practicing since), that this finding is in direct conflict with my passions. I also want to learn more about data analysis and statistics, because these are becoming even more necessary core skills for evidence-based thinking across practically every professional domain I expect to end up working in; and they are much less inaccessible to self-directed learning than they were five years ago.

Before entering in the school what should children learn? The conceptual skills for school already are largely social and self-regulatory abilities rather than academic skills. Managing one’s own attention in short bursts, being able to handle low levels of frustration without full emotional dysregulation, following simple instructions from adults outside the family context and participating in basic forms of cooperative social interaction with peers – these are the skills that underpin all subsequent formal learning. Academic pre-training — letter recognition, number sense, basic vocabulary breadth — is helpful but far less important than the self-regulation and social skills that quote final outcome whether or not a child can engage effectively in a classroom setting. Those with strong self-regulation and social competencies but weak academic pre-skills catch up academically within a year or so; those with the opposite profile struggle far longer.

Q — How does a good learner learn something new? Regardless of the specific domain involved, effective learners share a constellation of approaches and orientations that distinguish their learning from less successful patterns. As a result, their brains activate the attentional and motivational systems that are most conducive to deep encoding for new material out of curiosity as opposed to obligation. Rather than absorbing content that they store away separately, they actively connect new information to what they already know (asking how it relates to their prior abilities). They welcome confusion and difficulty as signs that real learning is taking place, not proof of personal deficiency, persevering in the face of the disorientation real intellectual challenge produces. They actively seek feedback and process it by engaging in honest self-assessment, not defensiveness. And their practice is deliberate, spaced — returning to material over time but doing so and engaging in a practiced way within areas of weakness rather than passively re-reading which fools the learner into thinking they know something that requires deep consolidation for true mastery.