To live is to learn. We are all born with an innate curiosity as a daily means to explore and make sense of our world. It is natural, and ordinary, for the youngest amongst us to seek out novelty whilst at the same time craving routine. This holds true as well for many adults.
As evolving human beings, we often lack the discernment to understand that there are certain behaviors, attitudes, and words that are not in anyone’s best interest to learn. To the young mind, most adults are potential teachers, regardless of the content they individually espouse. Young minds and hearts simply haven’t grown into exercising the active judgment necessary to say “no” to taking in any and all forms of information, whether meaningful or junk.
To some, the notion of “don’t learn (or practice) this!” seems to fly in the face of being a liberal and open-minded person. We know that children mimic the behaviors, words, and psychological attitudes of their elders. This is especially true the “closer in” those adults are to the impressionable young people around them.
I’ve spent many decades of my adulthood unlearning the untruths taught, or ignored, throughout my (mostly public) school career. This goes way beyond the “Washington chopped down a cherry tree” type of teachings first iterated, heard, and, sadly, memorized in the early elementary grades. But untruths shared through our academic curricula are clearly not the only falsehoods one hears and sees through their formative years. While the specifics vary from child to child and community to community, we’ve all taken in — and even become inured to — misrepresentations of fact, as well as inappropriate or manipulated interpretations of how and why “we” do “things” in particular ways.
Beyond learning facts and taking in data, we eventually come to learn how to think about and respond to people, most especially those who differ from ourselves in particular ways. Of course, the innocence of curiosity comes first. Not much later, we may become suspicious or even scared of these differences between ourselves and others. This kind of fear — and/or ignorance — does not come from within ourselves: they are taught and insidious. All too soon these fears and suspicions turn into pre-judgment of others, or prejudice. That which advances from the emotional to the behavioral also drives passive prejudice into active discrimination. This then may invoke all manner of negative “—isms” into our daily actions and iterations (perhaps even without our conscious awareness).
This is indeed part (the sadder part) of the learning process, which we then need to take one step further. If we strive to become open-minded and less judgmental of others, we must take the leap to unlearn the narrow-mindedness we’ve been steered and headed into. To do so, we must add new resources and sources of learning that actively contradict the stories we’ve been told or ways of being that have been handed over to us.
Even while we are un-learning aspects of our past, there is still a “what still remains” (or vestigial) element in our education-for-life. For me, the racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and antisemitism that I have observed and experienced throughout my life are things I’ve had to fight against again and again. This means that I’m dealing with both my own “triggers” as well as those of others. And I must somehow replace the process of unlearning the negatives with learning new positives or frameworks that are without the passionate and overzealous functioning of the “truths” I was taught earlier in life.
Does this sound exhausting, bewildering, and perhaps overwhelming? It is! We are all operating on permanent information overload and non-stop info-dumping. When we’re too young to know the difference, we’re trained to take on the culturally predominant attitude and behavior of those in the cultural, racial, religious, and economic majority. And, not knowing any better, we “puppet” back to others around us what we’ve heard, without necessarily understanding or agreeing knowledgably with any of it. It is as though we’ve become young and spongy ping-pong balls between two warring and opposing sides and we simply lack the wisdom and vision to know how to jump off the ping-pong table.
In time, over the course of our adult lives, many of us learn to become more adept at discernment and becoming dubious of information trails that come at us. We learn to ask tough questions (my favorite one is simple: “Is there more?”), to build our opinions over time rather than impulsively or opportunistically. We may even learn to question ourselves, to look again at what we think we have learned and may know. I call this “practiced intelligence” in that we are constantly thinking and re-thinking our perspectives and approaches to ideas and people and relationships. If we cannot build this kind of moral backbone, it is highly possible that we may regress to earlier ways of passively taking in information (known in academic circles as the “banking method” of education) provided by any “authority” or adult “expert.”
It might be better to look at ways of living through careful observation, deep querying, learning how to do ethical research, and learning who and how to trust. While we gather appropriate data and observe positive interactions and dynamics, we can strengthen ourselves internally. As we do, we can grow our inner moral compasses that can redirect us out of narrow and limited ways of thinking and acting. Learning and unlearning are part and parcel of the human condition, and the best teaching includes strong ways to question, wonder, rethink, and reframe. We all have that potential — it’s what we do and where we go and grow with it that matters most.
Daniel Cantor Yalowitz writes a regular column in the Recorder. A developmental and intercultural psychologist, he has facilitated change in many organizations and communities around the world. His two most recent books are “Journeying with Your Archetypes” and “Reflections on the Nature of Friendship.” Reach out to him at danielcyalowitz@gmail.com.