Hi learners,

do you learn the way you do because somebody taught you to learn that way?

When researchers Kornell & Bjork and Hartwig & Dunlosky asked that question, 65% to 80% of students answered “no.”

The trouble is most schools and universities don't teach you how to learn. Nor, do they operate among a learner-centered paradigm.

"A paradigm is a closed set of beliefs, and these underlying beliefs or assumptions set the boundaries for what can be seen from that paradigm. So, in the case of the school-centered paradigm, it is a closed set of beliefs about kids, how they learn, what they are to learn, how to measure their learning, what education is, and how it should be done," education reimagined states.

Yet, overcoming the existing paradigm is tricky.

System thinker Donella Meadows wrote: "Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm."

A paradigm is the fishbowl we're swimming in without realizing there is a sea - a different kind of reality.

“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’", David Foster Wallace said.

We're all immersed in our existing education paradigm. We can't distinguish ourselves from the existing beliefs about how schools work.

Here are a couple of underlying assumptions within our current education paradigm:

• assessment through standardized testing and grades
• outcome-focus on academic achievements
• the purpose of education is to produce future workforce
• teachers and professors are the unique source of knowledge
• an inherent dominance (adults > children; professionals > students)
• lectures and listening are a valid form of learning
• subjects exist in hierarchies (math, languages > art, music)
• content should be delivered in discrete subjects

I invite you to question the current paradigm: How would schools and universities look like so that all young people can flourish?

It's part of our collective responsibility to create better learning environments for the generations to come.

Happy learning :)

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Featured Articles

Here's a collection of my articles. All links are friend links, so you can read these stories without having a Medium subscription.
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• 🧠 A Quick Manual to Turn You Into an Effective Learner for Life — It’s not what you’ve learned at uni. (4 min)
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Learning Nuggets

🧠 Get the most out of what you read

What if you could collect relevant knowledge around you, connect it, and access it whenever you want to?

​Readwise makes it easy to revisit and learn from your ebook & article highlights.

In the past year, I experimented with different tools for capturing, collecting, distilling, creating, and sharing knowledge. I spent hours exploring and comparing tools like Notion, Obsidian, Miro, MindMeister, Simplenote, Milanote, Feedly, Instapaper, Typora, Ulysses, PowerNotes, Refind, and the like.

One tool I won't ever give up again is Readwise.

​Readwise is the best software to combine spaced repetition with your e-books. It’s an online service that connects to your Kindle account and imports all your Kindle highlights. Then, it creates flashcards of your highlights and allows you to export your highlights to your favorite note-taking app (e.g. Roam, or Obsidian). Here's how you can use it for your personal knowledge management.

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“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
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​— Albert Einstein (aka the terrible husband)

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