Teaching your inner child

I've recently been thinking about the difference between knowing about doing something, and knowing how to do something. You can read all about badminton from the internet, learn all the rules, join badminton forums, watch badminton games, argue about important badminton-related issues with other fans. Badminton could become your life without you even being able to actually play the game.

This sounds pretty obvious when we talk about sports or other physical pursuits, but we're happy to ignore it when it comes to learning. Consider language education in schools. You are tempted with the delicious bait of learning how to communicate in a new language, but then hit with the switch: grammar. Grammar isn't how to use language, it's about language. All of a sudden you're memorising arbitrary tables of information which, of course, don't help you to actually communicate. I suppose it's no coincidence that immersion learning, widely considered the best method, is built around actual doing.

One of the best books on this is Timothy Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis, which describes that exact phenomenon as applied to tennis. Gallwey argues, long before any of the serious work on dual process theory, that you should consider yourself as being made up of a logical reasoning self and an associative, intuitive self. Most people, he argues, teach tennis to the reasoning self, when it's the intuitive self who has to actually play. And isn't that silly?

I'd go a step further and say that most of the time we don't even acknowledge the existence of the associative self. Your reasoning says "I have realised I am eating too much, I will stop doing that", then later there is food in front of you and you eat too much. You are confused. "I knew I didn't want to eat too much, but I ate too much anyway. Maybe I am dumb and broken!" Maybe. But the more likely culprit is trying to use reasoning on your associative self, who simply doesn't understand it. You thought about not eating, you didn't think of how not to eat.

So I think that there is a big gap waiting to be filled along those lines. If the techniques we use for teaching are too rational, too abstract, too about-ish for our associative brain to deal with, then we need new techniques. And I imagine they're going to look totally unlike the way we teach the reasoning self.