WHAT IS LEARNING?

"Learning is experiencing; everything else is just information"
                                                           Albert Einstein

I always assumed that learning was what happened to me at school- that is at least when I was paying attention.. But a few years ago I started to read the works of Krishnamurti and he presented a rather different perspective.  K tells us that learning is not accumulative- it is not the accumulation of knowledge, information etc. In other words very little learning actually takes place in schools. What occurs predominately in schools is absorption/adsorption of data and its regurgitation during exams. In contrast, learning can only occur with a clear, unbiased mind, unclouded by prior conceptions or ideas. To those of us privileged to have gained a university education, relinquishing our ideas and preconceptions, in order to really learn- is quite a challenge!
Several decades ago I became acquainted with the writings of Christopher Alexander - specifically "A Pattern Language" and "The Timeless Way of Building". Both are masterpieces and their most intriguing aspect is that they are written by a respected architect who is telling us that we all can build- if only we truly listen to ourselves. How many professionals do you know who are willing to make such a daringly modest assertion? But Alexander is very clear- you cannot start from a place of knowing, from a set of ideas or preconceptions.
Another perspective on the same theme came to me on learning about the work of Betty Edwards. As an art teacher she often became frustrated to see her students unable to accurately reproduce an object as a drawing. One day, an inspiration led her to ask her students to try turning upside down a drawing that they had been assigned to copy. The resulting drawings produced by the students amazed her in their accuracy. Edwards later concluded that ordinary thinking and preconceived ideas get in the way of simply seeing things as they really are. Looking at the upright object in front of them, the student brain uses predominantly the left hemisphere which is mainly concerned with rationality and logic- and the student draws upon past experience and knowledge about the object. However, when the object is turned upside down and the left hemisphere is deprived of its ability to recognise and name the object, it drops out of the task, turning it over instead to the right- creative hemisphere. A similar result was found when students are asked to draw a chair. However, instead of drawing the structure itself, they are asked to do this by drawing the spaces between the legs. The left-side logical brain recognises a chair and will tap into past experience of chairs- which may or may not coincide with the exact image in front of them- with the resultant unsatisfactory result. However, when asked to draw the spaces between the legs, the left hemisphere cannot call upon any useful experience that defines such spaces. In such a situation, the task is handed over to the right, creative brain which reflects what it actually sees.
From all these examples it becomes clear to me that, whilst, of course we need to be able to use the logical, thinking brain for all manner of tasks and everyday life situations, we also need to be able to override our mind's reflexive tendency to judge, name, define when what we need to do is just "experience" and "be in the moment".