Learning: can you see it yet?

Bella, who is 11, learns from the minute she wakes, to the time she closes her eyes & sleeps.

I know this, because when I pass her room at 7:10am I can hear her listening to TikTok videos, and after I have read to her at night she asks me for a few minutes on her phone (to watch TikTok videos).

Did I catch you out? Did I catch you thinking ‘but is that really ‘learning’?’. If I did, it is because people have started to use the word ‘learning’ as if it meant ‘education’.

Sometimes she shows me what she is watching on TikTok and I wonder what she is learning. As far as I can tell, she is learning about culture – about what is cool, about what you should do and not do, about how to fit in. Because this is the most important thing. This is what she cares about.

One day we put an egg in vinegar, contained in a plastic bag, and froze it to see what would happen. Someone on TikTok had said this would turn the egg translucent – so we did the experiment. It didn’t work, so I guess she learned not to believe everything you see on TikTok.

Adults do something similar: this morning someone on Radio4’s ‘Broadcasting House’ said ‘did you see that tweet by so-and-so…?’ then proceeded to share what they had learned.

In ‘How People Learn’ I remark that education has pushed learning to the fringes of our lives. Now that education is out of the way for a while, I wonder if we will be able to see learning more clearly?

*Image: Daria Shevtsova