As most of you know I have spent two-thirds of my life as a college teacher. Throughout most of that time I have tried to operate according to an educational philosophy that emphasizes the process of learning rather than simply learning an on facts and about ideas as ends in themselves. Often, I called this process “learning to learn.” My teaching emphasis has been on helping students discover ideas and explore their consequences and implications on a first-hand basis. We did this together as a process in classroom discussions and by writing “thesis papers.”
Over the years my own sense of the value of approaching learning by doing, through class discussions and writing short papers, has been consistently rewarded, both by your own evaluations and my own sense of fulfilment. We did this by writing short thesis papers, discussing your ideas with the class as a whole, and my writing comments on your papers. We broadened our scope by writing “integrative papers” at the end of each course unit. The emphasis was always on the process of thinking and learning together. In short, we focused on “learning to learn”, rather than on exposing ourselves to and remembering certain pieces of information.
It was always my chief joy to see this process at work, and to see you and your classmates actually enjoy the learning process for yourselves. This joy is focused and exemplified in the Peanuts cartoon where Linus expresses his pleasure at having discovered that one can put one block on top of the other. He found that the realization that there are connections and relationships between and amongst ideas, represented here by respective blocks, exhilarated and pleased him.
I like to think that the years of seeing students express this same joy about the work we were doing together clearly indicated that real learning was taking place in the classrooms where we worked together. Indeed, I’ll readily admit that over these 60 years of being in the classroom with the likes of you folks has been the chief joy of my life! Although I have managed to publish a good many books and scholarly papers down through the years, the original calling I felt to become a teacher back in the 1950s has been fulfilled in the classroom with you folks, not in the scholarly accomplishments. (CF. my book Learning to Learn)
I’ll readily admit that I did not start out in my teaching career with a desire to help students “learn to learn”. It took several years before I realized that leaning is really about “learning to learn.” The process is far more important than the outcome. Another way to put this is to say that if the process is done correctly, the outcome will take care of itself. As Linus puts it, “It is magnificent” His smile says it all. I should also readily admit that I myself was anything but a stellar student all the way from first grade through college.
I did not realize until long afterwards that my own school education, from the third grade through the nineth, was directed by a group of teachers who had been taught according to the goals and methods of one John Dewey, the founder of what is called “progressive” education. Dewey’s motto was “We learn by doing.” Perhaps more of Dewey’s philosophy of education seeped into me than I ever realized. Be that as it may, I am proud to be able to say that many, if not most, of my students caught on to the idea that the key to real education is to “learn how to learn.” As Linus says: “It’s a very special thing.”