My Dog Teaches … Unlearning
 September. Summer is unofficially over. The hours of daylight
are getting noticeably shorter. The temperature is beginning to
drop at night and the leaves, right on cue, are starting to
turn.
We’ve made our trips to the store for binders, stationery,
backpacks, geometry sets. For the older kids, textbooks,
calculators, possibly laptops. Maybe some new clothes and shoes.
Now it’s back to school … probably with the mixed emotions of
excitement and trepidation for kids and parents alike.
Though some of us may be mindful of Mark Twain’s warning, “Don’t
let schooling get in the way of your education”, all of us send
our kids off to school with the hope and aspiration that somehow
they will get an education that will enable them to succeed in
life. That is, after all, supposed to be the ultimate goal of
education.
And although we sometimes perceive learning to be hard,
requiring as it does considerable application and effort, we can
be oblivious to the fact that
unlearning something
can be significantly more difficult. Sometimes what we have
already absorbed can get in the way of any further learning.
What, after all, is a habit? It is something that we learned to
do (usually at an early age) and despite all our attempts at
breaking it, we just can’t seem to unlearn it. That awkward golf
swing that repeatedly puts our ball in the rough is the one we
learned first and, no matter how much the golf instructor tries
to correct us, it seems that we can’t get rid of our bad habits
to start again correctly. The poor car driver somewhere along
the line stopped learning to be a better one; the irony is that
he probably thinks that he is the only good driver on the road.
Fear, false information, misunderstandings, bad press,
influences from friends and family, statements from authorities,
our own decisions that we know all about it … all of these can
cause us to cease to look and think for ourselves. Learning
stops.
Somehow, that first decision or way of doing something seems to
be much more entrenched for us and can color all our later ones.
As an example, you can probably recall trying to solve a puzzle
and coming back to the first solution you thought of over and
over again, even though you knew it didn’t work.
Once we have taken in some data and accepted it as fact, it then
appears to be difficult to change our mind – to unlearn it. That
is why the press can have such a negative influence on our
thinking. By sensationalizing everything, they can convince us
that black is white and white is black. Remember a few years ago
the hysteria generated here in Ontario about “pit bulls”? None
of it was based on any real data, but a terrific number of
people decided that pit bulls were inherently dangerous. And if
someone has already decided that pit bulls are much more
dangerous than other dogs, how is he ever going to learn that
perhaps this may not be true? Just by the nature of his
decision, he will tend to avoid any contact with an environment
where he may learn otherwise.
In the face of erroneous data and prejudice, we actually find it
very difficult or impossible to learn something new. We’ve all
encountered someone who has his mind already made up about
something with which we are knowledgeable. No matter how much we
carefully disprove his erroneous opinions, we can’t change his
mind.
What is prejudice but an inability to learn information that
conflicts with something one has already “learned”? Someone
decides that pit bulls are dangerous and no matter how often it
is demonstrated to him that this is not the case, he just can’t
seem to shake that initial conclusion.
So how do we unlearn something in order to unlock the door to
real learning? The first step, easily stated but just as easily
overlooked, is to realize that perhaps there is something there
to learn. Maybe we don’t know all there is to know about it.
Maybe the information we have about something is erroneous. An
attitude of being curious and being inquisitive will take us far
along the road to knowledge. But you do have to look for
yourself and to think for yourself to walk along that road.
It does no good to become indecisive … we can’t go through life
without making decisions. So by all means, come to your own
decisions and conclusions. But make sure you can trust the data
on which you are basing them by taking a good and honest look
for yourself.
No matter how educated we become, all of us have picked up
erroneous information somewhere along the line. The real trick
is to unlearn it.
Previous "Petitorial"
articles by David McKague:
Editor’s note:
I would like to encourage dog lovers everywhere
to start a PETITION to have this law thrown out or revised to such
a form where justice prevails. SFR.
|
|
