Have you ever watched the TV show, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? In this program, adult participants are quizzed on fifth grade textbook topics, opposing a panel of fifth grade students. Adults generally don’t do very well, while students shine. Why is this? Could adults, with much more education, including college degrees, know less than 10- and 11-year-olds? This program clearly points out some important differences between child learning and adult learning that I will discuss in this article.
Let’s start with a 4-stage learning model.
- Stage 1: Data
- Stage 2: Information
- Stage 3: Knowledge
- Stage 4: Wisdom
The first stage of learning is data collection. We are all inundated with data: every page we read, every email and text message, everything we listen to, in fact, everything captured by all of our senses is data. Elementary school students are taught a great deal of data. Adults are also inundated with data, but while students are expected to absorb everything they are taught, adults look for relevance and purpose within the data: they filter the data according to their needs and interests.
Management guru, the late Peter Drucker, said that when you give data relevance and purpose, you get information, the second stage of the learning model. Adults seek information. Children do not know what will be relevant and useful in their lives, so they absorb all the data that is given to them. As they mature and become adults, much of the data they learned in school is stored in their brains so they can focus on what is relevant and useful to their lives. For some people, a lot of this data is buried deep in their long-term memories and can be remembered – these people become trivia experts and Jeopardy contestants. But for most people, much of the data that is absorbed in school is lost, which is why adults have such a hard time on television.
The third stage of learning is knowledge. Knowledge comes from applying the information you have obtained to your work or life. Until you apply that information, you cannot say that you really know it. For example, I like to cook. I’ve watched a lot of cooking shows on TV and they provide a lot of facts about recipes, ingredients, and cooking methods. Do I remember everything? No, I filter all that data by what I like to eat, those recipes that I would like to try become information for me, information that is relevant to my tastes in food and has a purpose in the sense that I want to try to make a recipe particular. But it’s only when I really test the recipe and cook something that I can say that to know how to make that dish.
The final stage of the learning model is wisdom. Wisdom comes from dialogue, demonstration, experience, and experimentation. For example, after preparing a dish multiple times, I may decide to try altering the recipe by adding another spice or using different vegetables in the dish than are required in the recipe. When I try these experiments, I learn what works and what doesn’t work for me, and that becomes my personal wisdom.
Much of what he taught young children never goes beyond Stage 1 of the model: data. You may find, for example, that the history of Native American tribes is interesting, but for most students the topic is not relevant to their lives and does not serve a purpose. In elementary and secondary school, these data are prescribed by the school system according to established curricula or what will be asked in tests.
As adults, we self-direct our learning. Even if our employer requires us to take a course on some topic, we filter what is taught by relevance and purpose to transform data into information. When we apply what we learn to our work or life, we transform it into personal knowledge. And as we gain experience using our knowledge and skills, we can develop some personal wisdom about what works and what doesn’t work for us in specific situations.
As children, our learning is directed by others. As adults, our learning is self-directed.