Learn, unlearn and relearn
About a month ago I received this quote in my inbox from Max Shapiro that I can’t seem to get out of my head.
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
– Alvin Toffler
I think I’m still young but even I am sometimes overwhelmed by new technologies and get tired at the thought of having to ‘unlearn’ my old habits and ‘relearn’ another new exciting technique. They say you are never too old to learn but you might just get too tired to invest time and energy in learning.
But, as Toffler explains, I need to keep up and persuade myself to keep evolving.
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Resolve, evolve and return.
Maybe it’s more about ‘adapting’ to new technologies than to ‘evolve’. Because there are so many new technologies and ways of looking at things, evolving in something seems nearly impossible. Unlearning the way you used to do your X thing is as big as learning to deal with the new technology or information, hence it takes a great amount of effort and energy.
Hi Boris,
I am sure we are all more than proficient in changing, adapting, learning, as fast as we need to. Do you still remember Sinclair Spectrum and Basic and PC XT, and, …but, I am getting tired, too, sometimes
hey, boris, are these 2 last comments a spam? i’ve got notification to my email
regards, adam
reuse relearn repurpose
Interesting to see a common link between a recent conference I just attended at Harvard on Learning Differences and your blog on “unlearning, learning, and learning.”
One of the speakers used this phrase and I did not know it came from Alvin Toffler until I viewed TED’s video on Ken Robinson talking about Creativity and how schools should change its ways of teaching.
The concept that we are evolving is probably a better representation of this phrase instead of saying that we may at times be too tired to invest time and energy to learn new things. It is true though that not everyone has the optimal capacity to go through change. However, if one based it on survival of the fittest; then it is those who are fittest to withstand the challenges of “change” , are those that will make the most of the 21st century.
Cognitive flexibility is the key to all this.