Learning a subject

We constantly question our Education. As if what you learn at School and College are totally responsible for what you are. We judge people by the degrees they get, the schools they went.

This is not very different from the way we make decisions to vote a party to power by judging the leader’s goodwill.

And hence we have a plethora of colleges vying for the top slots in research, coveted positions in top companies, similar to the way political parties project their leaders as messiahs.

In reality, Education is all about the need to learn a subject that is an unknown to you. So you need someone, a teacher, who can help you understand it. So the problem shifts from understanding the subject to finding a good teacher.

How do you find a good teacher?

To find a good teacher in a subject of your choice, you have to look around and listen to many people who talk about that subject and see if they make sense to you. Initially it will be hard to follow. Because you are not yet trained to look with the same eyes as that of the teacher.

Here is where, books come to the rescue. Finding good books in that subject, often the easy ones will help you get started on it.

As you switch between reading and listening, you end up forming a mental model of that subject. Every subject has its own dictionary of terms and connections that mean something. The sharper you get at organizing this mental model on a subject, the better you are at applying them to real world situations.

It is very hard to keep improving your models without being able to apply it in real world situations. If you are learning to play a Piano, it is important to understand the Music language which are the Staff notations. However, there are a thousand nuances that you need to master and you can easily get bored if you don’t apply that model and play a Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven. You learn a bit of the theory or model and you play a bit. You repeat this.

Finding a good teacher, a good book and working through the model and the application will make you learn a subject.

In this open world of today, finding a good teacher is not so difficult, nor finding material. All you need to have is your inclination to learn a subject and your steadfastness in mastering it.

Unfortunately we miss this simple aspect of learning and we end up playing to the market economics, scoring in exams, comparing schools and teachers, looking at extraneous things that may not help in our learning, ultimately moving away from the goal of learning a subject to that of being recognized as someone who knows a subject.

The difference between learning a subject and getting a degree in that subject is that, in the latter case, you are forced to learn it within a given time for a given price at a given place. Learning rarely happens when it is constrained like this. Learning done in a hurry can miss several aspects of a subject.

Because most subjects are so vast in terms of content, their relationship to other subjects, it takes a long time for human brain to understand it fully. So if you truly want to learn something, and you are not constrained in any way, do not compromise with getting a degree in a university.

Become a practitioner of that subject. Explore related or even unrelated subjects keeping that as the base and expand your world view. This can help you solve bigger and long standing problems in a space.

If you know a subject, then the people who need those who know that subject cannot miss you.