A.J. Swoboda has spent a lot of time recently thinking through how to be better at learning.
In fact, he recently wrote an entire book about how people can be better learners in an increasingly divided yet information-saturated age.
He isn’t alone in trying to work out how we can optimise our learning.
In 1976, a famous study, dubbed the ‘Scaffolding Study’, followed the progress of teachers helping young children build pyramids out of blocks.
Tutors adjusted their support depending on each child’s level of competence.
Help was slowly reduced as the kids gained skill.
The teachers’ experience provided the ‘scaffold’ to support the students’ learning.
This idea – that we rely on others to help build our scaffold – might sound obvious.
But what isn’t apparent is who the people making that scaffold should be.
In the information age, this question is more important than ever—and it means we need to be extra careful about who we learn from.
While learning how to learn, A.J. had some ideas about the type of people we should consider when looking for help building our scaffolds.
Here are three tips from A.J. on whom to learn from- some will surprise you.
Tip 1. Learn from strangers
This is the least surprising in this list; we learn from strangers daily!
No matter how well we think we know someone, the person on the other end of the podcast microphone, YouTube channel, or TikTok reel from which we learn often doesn’t know who we are.
Still, making time for the advice of a stranger can be more beneficial for our learning than we might expect.
“When you read about something you’re trying to find information for, along the way you end up learning all this stuff you weren’t looking for,” A.J. said.
“We can now create bubbles for ourselves, but strangers do not say or think what we want them to say.
“This does not mean that every stranger is right, nor does it mean that every stranger is safe – you gotta be discerning – but reading, listening to, and talking to people you don’t know may end up popping that bubble and help you to see things in a perspective you never could have imagined before.”
Learning from strangers – including strangers outside our algorithm – is good advice.
For A.J.’s next tip for learning, though, things get a little weird.
Tip 2. Learn from the dead
At first glance, learning from the dead might sound counterintuitive.
How could the dead speak into our experience when the world has changed so much?
We’re in the age of the iPhone and AI. We’re the pinnacle. The dead are behind us … and beneath us.
But oftentimes, the dead have grappled with the same questions about life and meaning that continue to baffle us today.
The brilliant theologian, writer, and professor C.S. Lewis would have agreed with A.J.’s idea of learning from the dead.
Here’s part of his introduction to an edition of the long-dead theologian Athanasius’ book On The Incarnation.
“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus, I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said.”
C.S. Lewis was a big fan of reading – and learning from – the dead. Here he is, in his teachable element.
Just because someone is dead doesn’t mean their attempts to answer life’s big questions are irrelevant.
“We are naively committed to new things being truer and better,” A.J. said.
“We think that because it’s new, it’s right (but) you don’t have to work very hard to figure out that just because it’s new does not make it right in any way, shape or form.”
The theologian G.K. Chesterton also championed this notion of reading the dead, referring to tradition – “the democracy of the dead” — as a way to expand our limited cognitive horizons.
Learning from strangers and the dead are two helpful ways to grow in teachability.
A.J.’s final tip, though, is the most challenging.
Tip 3: Learn from thy enemies
Learning from an enemy is a big taboo in our increasingly polarised world.
Reading, listening to, or watching the content of a perceived ‘enemy’ is often equated with supporting them.
This idea is a relatively new cultural phenomenon, though.
Logically speaking, learning what your opponents believe is often a great way of clarifying your thoughts – and it was an approach many took throughout history.
A.J. points to the church fathers – theologians who lived and led in the first 500 years of Christianity – as exemplars of “learning from thy enemy”.
These writers wrote treatises that extensively quoted their opponents to build a counterargument when combating numerous heresies, including Gnosticism and Arianism.
Augustine, Jerome, Lactantius, and others were well-versed in their opponents’ arguments and ideas.
They’d taken time to read their works and digest their ideas.
There are biblical precedents for this – perhaps most notably in Acts 17, where the Apostle Paul quotes the works of pagan philosophers Epimenides and Aratus in his sermon in Athens at the Areopagus.
Obviously, caution needs to be exercised when taking this approach.
“When I say ‘learn from your enemies’, that does not mean they’re right,” A.J. said.
“In the Western world, we assume learning from somebody means we agree with them … that is not the same thing.”
As A.J. notes, to combat what we perceive as bad ideas, we first need to understand them.
“If Jesus tells us to pray for our enemies and love our enemies … goodness gracious, shouldn’t we also learn from them?
“If I’m unwilling to learn from them, why should I expect them to learn anything from me?”
Adapted by Alasdair Belling from Undeceptions episode 160 ‘Deep Learning’. Listen here.
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