From the Archives: Unlearning is Embedded Within Learning

"Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out."
--Thomas Cardinal Wolsey

I've been hearing a lot about things we MUST unlearn lately and it has gotten me to weighing and considering... What follows is a somewhat disjointed thought process about unlearning and the processes that go with it. 

Now that I have two grandsons, I have been re-thinking the idea of unlearning. I have certainly used the concept of unlearning in my past work.  I no longer think we can or should unlearn many things. As I watch and wonder with these young minds, I realize that they come into this world so marvelously equipped to learn and make their way into the world.  The young mind travels through intense learning stages and focuses in ways that seem to close out the rest of the world.  My older son started talking early but when he started walking and figuring out what the world of walking and running was all about, he stopped talking.  I noticed things like this with both sons until one day, they seemed to be able to multi-task and work in new ways and a new world opened for them. 

Today I have watched my grandsons move through the cycle of "mine, and I have no intention of sharing" to "my turn next".  I don't think they unlearned selfishness; rather, think they expanded their context and opened to a new world of possibility. 

I think that when we over use the word and concept of "unlearning" we discount context and culture.  We spend our time feeling guilty about our ways and assumptions. The etomology of Learning is to reach beyond ... to go beyond what one knows.  To me, this means enlarging our context, reframing, reaching beyond. 

When I must "unlearn", it makes me wrong. I don't like to be wrong. I harbor self-guilt. Rather than acknowledging I was wrong, I tend to hold my point, hunker down and not change my position.  I was working within a context and culture. I learned what I learned for a purpose and I built my life around assumptions that I held to be true.  I can remember a number of peak experience that I have had where my whole world seems to reframe and something I head dear falls away naturally, opening my world to larger more interesting possibilities. In one moment, the old falls away, the new takes hold and I am off on another journey. There is no conscious, or forced unlearning.  When this kind of learning happens, I am freed from my past. I still have the memories and I can see where I trapped myself. I can establish new patterns for myself rather than having them forced on me by others. 

"Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything--all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it." -- Charly in Flowers for Algernon