KM Principle - teach people to learn how to learn

Teaching people to 'learn how to learn'

I feel very strongly that one of the primary principles of effective knowledge management must be to teach people better to 'learn how to learn'.

What I mean by that is simply to change the educational curriculum from teaching mainly 'specific content' to teaching the 'process' of effective learning.

Its good to teach content to create engineers and scientists and whatever society thinks it needs, but its far more important to teach people to learn, especially now that we have identified accelerated learning processes and radically new ways to communicate, collaborate, learn and share globally.

This better learning process should start at primary school, in a simple way, and develop through higher education and through to effective knowledge working in our organizations, and throughout life.

This should be the true meaning of 'education'.

If we learn how to learn better, we can then adapt more quickly to the world. We can be more aware, more focused and more effective in our work. Most importantly, the process of learning how to learn is the essence of enabling effective lifelong learning.

It is interesting to me that the World Bank, in their annual report Measuring Knowledge in the World's Economies' talk of 4 pillars for effective knowledge creation and application.

Measuring Knowledge in the World's Economies

1. Economic and Institutional Regime

2. Education and Skills

3. Information and Communication Infrastructure

4. Innovation System

Pillar 2 talks about knowledge as "The country's people need education and skills that enable them to create and share, and to use it well".

I strongly suggest that those individuals, teams, organizations, communities and countries that embrace this pillar fully, and who change the educational curriculum to teach people to better 'learn how to learn' will leap ahead in the global knowledge economy and society.

Ron Young