Learning Is Learnable (And We Ought To Teach It)

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Learning Is Learnable (And We Ought To Teach It)
Guy Claxton
University of Bristol
Graduate School of Education
In the National Commission for Education report
Ten Years On, edited by Sir John Cassell, 2004.
‘The thing that I’m scared of is, say I got laid off, I’ve got nothing, nothing to help me
get another job…I’ve got no other skill.’ Todd, aged 18, bricklayer
‘I guess I could call myself smart. I can usually get good grades. Sometimes I worry,
though, that I’m just a tape recorder…I worry that once I’m out of school and people
don’t keep handing me information with questions, I’ll be lost.’ Emily, aged 15, GCSE
student
There are two good reasons for reconfiguring 21
st
century education: economic and
personal. The well-rehearsed economic argument says that knowledge is changing
so fast that we cannot give young people what they will need to know, because we
do not know what it will be. Instead, we should be helping them to develop supple
and nimble minds, so that they will be able to learn whatever they will need to. If we
can achieve that, we will have a world-class work-force comprising people who are
innovative and resourceful. The personal argument converges on the same
conclusion. Many young people are patently floundering in the face of all the
complexities and uncertainties of contemporary life: the relatively successful children
of the middle class, like Emily, as much as the more conspicuous, traditional failures
of the education system such as Todd. Emily sees herself as ready for a life of tests,
but not the tests of life. Todd does not even believe that he has it in him to master a
new skill.
They differ greatly in how ‘literate’ and ‘numerate’, but Emily and Todd are both, in
their different ways, ‘illearnerate’. They do not think of themselves as effective real-
life learners, and they are probably right not to. They think that school has not only
failed to give them what they need; it has actually compounded the problem, and
they are right again. Many young people live in a Matrix world in which there is often
no consensual ‘reality’, no agreement about what to do for the best, and in which
nobody taught them what to do when they didn’t know what to do. Their public culture
of ‘cool’ is, in part, a reaction to their sense of inadequacy and insecurity in the face
of real difficulty. Young people want more real-life gumption, more initiative, more
stickability, just as their prospective employers and anxious governments do. More
fundamental even than the concern with literacy and numeracy is the need to protect

and develop young people’s ‘learnacy’. That need is personal and social, even more
than it is economic.
i
Government reforms have tinkered with existing provisions and structures in dozens
of ways: the timetable, the curriculum, the methods of assessment and so on. Such
tinkering has been going on for a long time, and it has not addressed the hole in the
heart of education which young people like Emily and Todd are experiencing so
keenly. However, recent progress in the human sciences is beginning to fire people’s
imagination with new possibilities. Science cannot tell a society what its schools
should be aiming to achieve, but it can suggest new avenues of thought. One of
these is that it is actually possible to help young people become better learners – not
just in the sense of getting better qualifications, but in real-life terms. One
contributory line of thought comes from cognitive science, one from neuroscience,
and one from what is called ‘sociocultural’ theory. Let me outline each in turn.
In cognitive science, a revolution has taken place in the way we think of ‘intelligence’.
For a while, people believed a number of rather odd things about intelligence. They
believed that it was a dollop of general-purpose mental resource that God or your
genes gave you when you were born; that it didn’t change much over the course of
life; that it followed you around from place to place and didn’t vary with the situation;
that its main effect was to set a ceiling on what you could achieve; that when you
struggled or failed, that was evidence that you had got to the limit of your ‘ability’; and
that you could reliably measure the size of someone’s reservoir of intelligence by
asking them to solve abstract puzzles that had no personal meaning or relevance in
a strange room under intense pressure. We now know that this model is scientifically
indefensible, factually incorrect, and educationally pernicious. It is indefensible
because, twins studies notwithstanding, you cannot separate ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ in
that way. It is incorrect because intelligence varies enormously across time and
place, and IQ bears no relation to being real-life smart. And it is pernicious because it
leads people to feel ashamed (rather than challenged) when they find things difficult,
and therefore it undermines their ambition and determination.
In fact, there is enormous room for everyone to get smarter by developing their
‘learnacy’. Even if there were some hypothetical limit on my ability, in practice I am
nowhere near it. True, I am never going to be as fit and strong as Steve Redgrave,
nor as fast and tough as Paula Radcliffe, but that does not mean that it is therefore a
waste of time my going to the gym. And when I do go, the whole point is to get hot
and sweaty and find it ‘hard’. Pushing myself need not mean ‘I’m hopelessly unfit –
and that’s that’; it shows me that I’m in the process of getting fitter. It was Jean Piaget
who first defined intelligence as ‘knowing what to do when you don’t know what to
do.’ And you can get better at that. Lauren Resnick, the doyenne of educational
psychologists in the States, now defines intelligence simply as ‘the sum total of your
habits of mind.’ And habits grow, change, and can be broken.
ii
This work is also showing that growing more intelligent is not just a matter of learning
a few techniques, or even mastering some new skills like ‘critical thinking’. It is as
much to do with attitudes, beliefs, emotional tolerances and values. And these
change more slowly. You can’t change someone’s interest in learning, or their
stickability, overnight. But schools and classrooms have systematic, cumulative
influence, as surely as rivers wear away their banks. For example, when teachers
change their way of talking with their students about learning, those students’
attitudes can change, in turn, within a term (and by the way, their results go up).
The second tributary discipline is neuroscience. One has to tread carefully here, for a
great deal of nonsense is being talked about the implications of brain science for

education. It is not true that playing your baby Mozart will make her smarter, nor that
your child’s brain will dry up if is not continually drip-fed water from a fancy bottle,
though some people will try to tell you otherwise. What is important is the
understanding that the brain is built to distil the world’s hidden regularities into
practical expertise, fuelled only by interest and attention. It does so continually,
without any supervision, either internal or external, and often in the absence of any
conscious comprehension of what is going on.
iii
Indeed, the effort to seek or maintain
conscious comprehension can get in the way of this brilliant ‘natural learning ability’.
Thinking too much can decrease your intelligence. Being explicit and strategic are
not always the smartest ways to learn, and people who become too addicted to
conscious clarity undermine their creativity.
iv
We are discovering that, during early life, this natural learning ability, placed in an
adequate setting, develops itself by discovering and exploiting a range of ‘learning
amplifiers’. There are many cells in the human brain – the ‘mirror neurons’ - that
automatically get ready to initiate an action that they have just seen someone else
do: so many, that it begins to look as if we are hard-wired to pick up the habits of
those around us. As the brain builds up a stock of mental models of different people,
so we become able to ‘put ourselves in their shoes’, and explore different scenarios.
We can sometimes benefit from turning down the ego control, and become quietly
receptive to the internal pattern-seeking and metaphor-making that is latent in the
brain’s modus operandi, and this intuitive receptivity, if we cultivate it, becomes
central to creativity. And, with language, we develop a whole new toolkit of ways of
thinking and learning. Each of these ways of learning – through immersion in
experience, through imitation, though imagination, through intuition and through the
intellect, is capable of growing and developing throughout life – provided the context
is conducive. We never grow out of the need for any of them, nor do we ever cease
being able to refine and develop their power still further. Yet education has tended to
treat intellectual learning as the tops, and to neglect the continuing development of
the others.
The third discipline is that of sociocultural studies. Back in the 1930s, the Russian
psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky discovered just how much people
unintentionally ‘pick up’ not just their physical but their mental habits and values from
those around them.
v
Children learn, from watching their elders, what to notice, what
to ignore, what to laugh at, what to be afraid of. And they also pick up how to respond
to uncertainty: what to do (and how to feel) when they don’t know what to do, in other
words. From this point of view, the way a teacher reacts when a well-planned lesson
inexplicably goes wrong, for example, is at least as relevant to students’ development
as the lesson content. If a teacher never lets her students see her being a learner,
but only a ‘know-er’ (at worst, an anxious and dogmatic knower) she is depriving
them of the vital vicarious experience which their brains are built to pick up, and to
turn into more effective ways of learning for themselves. Helping young people
become better learners means daring to give up the old-fashioned belief that a
teacher’s top professional responsibility is to be omniscient. (If it’s knowledge you
want, it’s usually easier now to get it from the Internet, anyway.)
What these emerging insights about the mind add up to is an additional way of
thinking about the core purpose of education. Contra the facile polarisation of
commentators such as Chris Woodhead, attending to the process of learning does
not mean neglecting the content.
vi
Apprentice learners have to have interesting
things to learn about. But it does means that, while we are helping our students to
learn how to calculate compound interest, or write a poem, or think about the reasons
for global inertia in the face of African famine, we are also helping them to develop
into more confident, curious and capable learners. We can help them develop the

confidence to ask questions, to spot the flaws in an argument, and to know when and
how to make productive use of their intuition and imagination. We can start making
difficulty more interesting and less shameful, and showing young people what
reflective learning looks like.
There are, in short, many lines of educational exploration that are being opened up
by the new learning sciences. Already dozens of practical methods for building young
people’s ‘learning power’ have been devised, and ingenious teachers throughout the
UK (and around the world) are developing more by the day. Some of these are quite
unusual or challenging, while others add depth and coherence to more familiar
aspects of ‘good teaching’.
vii
Many more questions have been raised than we have
yet solved – but that, or course, is the essence of learning. What kinds of topics are
best for developing different kinds of learning muscles? How are minds stretched
differently by history and physics? How is resilience, say, different for a five and a
fourteen-year-old? Does the ‘learning power’ of boys and girls develop differently, or
require different kinds of support? How widely do people vary as learners, and can
we help them import their best learning habits from the sports hall or the dance class
into school (and vice versa)? What ways of organising schools will be the most
successful for both developing learnacy and mastering important bodies of
knowledge? As I say, we do not yet have the answers to all these questions. The
realisation that learning is learnable, and that learning is a much more complex and
variegated process than schooling has traditionally assumed, will underpin curriculum
development and educational research for the next ten years and beyond. When the
Schools Minister lists ‘learning how to learn in preparation for a lifetime of change’ as
one of the three core purposes for ‘the education of young Britons in the 21
st
century’,
we might at last be able to go beyond the exhausted mantra of ‘raising standards’, as
if exam results were the only things we could aim to improve.
viii
The potential policy implications are many and varied. Let me close by picking out
five. First, government policy, through groups such as the ‘Innovation Unit’ within the
DfES, needs to support grass-roots development and dissemination of good practice
in the particular sense of developing learning-to-learn. Second, the National
Curriculum needs an overall stock-take, to establish the extent to which its different
stages, subjects and targets do, or do not, constitute a coherent, cumulative
programme for the development of learning power. Third, initial teacher education
needs to coach beginning teachers in how to vocalise the processes of learning, to
‘learn aloud’, and to model effective learning; and this perspective should inform
discussions within the Teacher Training Agency, and perhaps also the General
Teaching Council. Fourth, parents must be encouraged, via national bodies as well
as local PTAs, to become partners with schools in developing their children’s learning
power. And finally, new assessment instruments need to be developed that enable
students, their teachers and parents to keep track of their developing learning power,
so that they can feel a growing sense of achievement, not just in passing tests, but in
becoming steadily more resilient, resourceful and reflective in the face of real
difficulties.
ix
If all these can be achieved in the next ten years, and young people
come to see that their schooling is genuinely equipping them to meet the complex
challenges of real 21
st
century life, many of them will be inspired to re-dedicate
themselves to learning, as a result of which their teachers are likely to re-discover the
joy of teaching – oh, yes, and the results go up, too.
Notes

i
The Industrial Society, Speaking Up, Speaking Out! The 2020 Vision Programme Research
Report, The Industrial Society: London, 1997.
ii
David Perkins, Smart Schools: Better Thinking and Learning for Every Child, Free Press:
New York, 1995.
iii
See e.g. Manfred Spitzer, The Mind Within the Net: Models of Learning, Thinking and
Acting, MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1999.
iv
Guy Claxton, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: Why Intelligence Increases When You Think Less,
Fourth Estate: London, 1997.
v
See e.g., Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education, Harvard University Press: Cambridge,
Mass., 1996.
vi
Chris Woodhead, Cranks, claptrap and cowardice, The Daily Telegraph, 2 March 2001.
vii
An introduction to these methods is provided in Guy Claxton, Building Learning Power:
Helping Young People Become Better Learners, TLO Ltd: Bristol, 2002. See
www.buildinglearningpower.co.uk
viii
David Miliband, North of England Education Conference, January 2003.
ix
A team at the University of Bristol, funded by the Lifelong Learning Foundation, has already
developed one such instrument, the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory, ELLI. See Ruth
Deakin-Crick, Patricia Broadfoot and Guy Claxton, Developing an Effective Lifelong Learning
Inventory, in preparation.