Brett Hall's Tweets About Learning

• The question before any educator or education system, or anyone "helping" children to learn is not: how can creativity, imagination and curiosity be fostered? It is: how can one avoid stifling the creativity, imagination and curiosity of the learner?
• Anyone can learn anything is true in principle. We can learn anything because we can explain anything.
• Learning is an abstract process of creating and criticizing guesses about the world around us. What our minds do is guess what is correct or what might work and then our minds criticize that guess. This is all that learning ever is. It is in short guess and check.
• Everyone is indeed capable of learning anything in any curriculum - in principle. But this idea - explanatory universality - also gives the only good account as to why they do not. It is not because they lack the intelligence (everyone is equally a universal explainer after all) but rather it can only be because they are not sufficiently interested to learn everything in the curriculum to super high proficiency. Where the education system, curriculum, teachers and parents everywhere and received wisdom says: the reason Jane or Johnny did not do well in this or that test is because they lack the cognitive capability to do so, explanatory universality says they have the cognitive capability to do so but chose to use that capability to do something else they preferred. And this should be expected because universal minds can do an infinite number of things and so we should not be surprised when even minds confined under punishment to learn the same thing choose not to learn the same thing.

Brett Hall on X/Twitter: @ToKTeacher