It is better to know how to learn than to know.
Unknown (often misattributed to Dr. Seuss)
The meaning of the quote
In 2014, engineering professor Barbara Oakley launched a free online course called Learning How to Learn, which she filmed in her basement. More than 2 million people have signed up since.
Oakley had flunked math and science all through school. Straight after high school she joined the US Army, because it would pay her to learn a language. She learned Russian well enough to work as a translator.
The Army then made her an officer in the Signal Corps, a branch built on math and technology. She went at math with the same practice and repetition that had drilled Russian words into her head, and the math started to stick. She went on to earn a PhD in engineering and now teaches engineering at Oakland University in Michigan.
She started with no math, but she knew how to learn, and that turned out to be enough.
Facts go out of date. The app you mastered last year gets redesigned and the rules at your job change, but if you know how to learn, you can pick up the new version too.
Back in 1970, in his book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler quoted psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy’s warning that tomorrow’s illiterate would be the person who never learned how to learn.
Action steps
Learning how to learn is a skill you can practise. Pick one thing you want to learn this month and try these steps on it.
- Test yourself instead of rereading. Close the book or video, write down what you remember and then check what you missed. Oakley says an hour spent testing teaches more than an hour spent studying.
- Spread it out. Short sessions over several days stick better than one long cram, so try 20 minutes a day for 5 days instead of 2 hours the night before.
- Reuse what worked before. Think of something you learned well, like a language, a sport or a recipe, and copy the method. Oakley used her Russian study habits on math.
- Notice what made it click. When something finally makes sense, write down what helped. Maybe it was a drawing or explaining it out loud to a friend. Over time you’ll build your own list of ways you learn best.
The method only works if you sit down and use it, and the willingness to learn is a choice you make each time something new feels hard.
Oakley made that choice with math, and now millions of people take the course she filmed in her basement.
About the author
Before his first book came out in 1937, Theodor Geisel walked down Madison Avenue in New York with a manuscript that 27 publishers had rejected. He was taking it home to burn.
On the way he ran into Mike McClintock, an old Dartmouth friend who had become a children’s book editor at Vanguard Press that morning, and Vanguard bought And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street the same day. Geisel later joked that if he’d walked on the other side of the street, he’d have ended up in the dry-cleaning business.
The man people credit with a quote about learning never finished his own degree. Geisel went to Oxford to study for a doctorate in English literature, but his notebooks filled up with doodles of strange animals. A fellow student named Helen Palmer saw them and told him he was crazy to try to be a professor.
He left Oxford without a degree, married Palmer and gave himself the doctorate anyway by putting “Dr.” in front of Seuss, his mother’s maiden name. Dartmouth made it official with an honorary doctorate in 1956.
His most famous book started as a fix for a reading problem. In 1954, writer John Hersey wrote a Life magazine article criticising the dull Dick and Jane readers that schools used to teach reading. William Spaulding, who ran the education division at Houghton Mifflin, read it and challenged Geisel to write a story first-graders couldn’t put down, using only words from a list for beginning readers.
Geisel was used to making up his own words, so sticking to a short list of easy ones meant learning a new way to work. It took him a year and a half. Out of frustration he picked the first 2 rhyming words he found on the list, cat and hat. The Cat in the Hat came out in 1957 with 236 different words, and it launched Beginner Books, a series made to help children learn to read.
The quote doesn’t appear in any of his books, but it’s easy to see why people pin it on him. Long before Oakley’s course, Geisel’s 236 words were teaching children to read, the skill they’d use to learn everything else.
Resources
- Learning How to Learn (Website)
- A Mind for Numbers (Book)
- How Barbara Oakley Cracked the Science of Learning (Article)
- Future Shock (Book)
- The Cat in the Hat (Wikipedia)
- Dr. Seuss (Wikipedia)
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