It was always amazing to me how easy it is to get sidetracked by following tangents in either my own thoughts or in conversations with others. The topic can be anything and very soon something else will pop into the conversation and take it where it was never meant to go. Unless there is some strong desire to come back to the original topic, the point that was supposed to be made is forever lost to something that at the time was more interesting.

This process is a very crucial factor in learning. In order to learn something, one has to pay attention, and in order to pay attention one has to posses some interest in the subject. While a conversation involves more than one person and the interests of participants will most likely be different, an individual will find his thought process to follow his own interests at the moment, making it easy to pay attention to wherever the thoughts are going.

The tangents in learning are different paths that a person takes in discovering the world. A child might play with a toy truck and then become interested in a number of things such as mechanical workings of vehicles, logistics of shipping goods, geography, infrastructure, history of transportation, family life of truck drivers, etc. By following these interests and whatever tangents arise from researching them, the child will encounter a vast amount of information. Some of that information will be learned and thus converted to knowledge, while the rest will be discarded. What becomes knowledge and what doesn’t is entirely up to the interests awakened in the child.

Different learning environments allow tangents to different degrees, and thus have different advantages and disadvantages.

In free play a person is, as the name implies, free to do whatever he wants. This is great because it allows him to absorb the most knowledge since he will devote his time and full attention to following any tangent to his thoughts he finds interesting. However, this may leave him stuck with things he already knows something about and slow down the discovery of new areas of possible interest.

Conversation is another way to gain knowledge. Talking with others lets the student find out about subjects that she herself may have never thought about. This in turn would allow new interests to form and be followed. Paying attention to the conversation is a bit harder than paying attention to your own thoughts, since you don’t have the full control of the flow of information. You have to listen to something that may not be very interesting to you, but is interesting to other participants. That may allow the concentration level to drop and some of the information would fail to be converted to knowledge.

The most restrictive form of learning is instruction. It is a one way street. Tangents are controlled by the instructor, and everyone else is there just as a witness, not as a participant. This allows mind to wander, following its own tangents. The information presented will most likely be only partially learned and even then to a lower degree than in a conversation. However, instruction can be a good way to expose yourself to ideas that you might find useful or desirable to learn, but not interesting enough to pursue them on your own.

I guess the worst kind of learning environment is the one we have in our public schools, where we have instruction which we’re forced to attend. We’re not even given a chance to consider whether that information is something we could find useful or interesting, we’re just forced to learn it, even if we forget it right after we’re tested. But that’s for another post…