by Eva van Loon Cognition Therapist

My funky California university is hot about transformative learning. Call it insight learning, because it is the kind of learning that hits you like a lightning flash. It rocks your world. Great stuff. But those flashes of insight are not all of learning, and not all of transformative learning, either. Sure, going to India and experiencing Tamil village life will change your life, but it won’t teach you to read better.

Decades of teaching have taught me there are two areas of learning. One, there’s the stuff you think about, sometimes long afterwards, chewing it over until finally it finds its place in your organism—or passes out of your life, like food you’re done with. Call that content learning.

Two, there’s stuff you have to struggle to make second nature, like riding a bike or driving, before the powers that be will even let you on the road. Getting a driver’s license is transformative in just about anyone’s book. Suddenly, you can move around your world with ease, just because this riding or driving skill has lodged itself unforgettably in your subconscious.

I’d call that transformative, wouldn’t you? It’s functional learning, too. It’s down there, in the subconscious, where you never have to work it all out again. It’s become automatic, like walking.

Think about your brain as a two-storey office: content learning happens upstairs in the conscious; functional learning happens downstairs where the shipping dock is and nobody sees it.

Reading is supposed to be like walking: automatic. A functional reader sees a sign and comprehends it without even remembering the words or shapes. Numbers, same thing. Basic logic, same thing. It must be automatic. Immediate. A subconscious, unforgettable skill. If you have to think about how to do it every time, it won’t work.

You see the page, the problem, or the situation—and you understand instantly what it’s all about. This is the true definition of literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking, the tripod of skills on which all content learning ultimately depends.

Content learning is easy once functional learning is in place. The flip side of that truth--which schools find difficult to recognise--is that content learning is sheer hell for a brain which has not yet achieved the basic levels of functional learning.

The lightning flash that made me a cognition therapist was the realisation that functional learning happens in a manner entirely different from content learning—and in a manner virtually impossible to install in our schools. The brain does functional learning in an environment chemically different from the exciting, engaging group climate of content learning that schools generally seek to create for their students.

That’s why “special ed” faces such enormous obstacles: times have changed drastically, and the children who come to Grade One with large parts of functional learning already in place are pitifully few compared to fifty years ago.

Next time: how to create a mental climate for functional learning.