Slow Learning
Whisky distilling is a really difficult thing to get up and running as a business. To be certified under the Scotch Whisky Regulations 2009 your whisky has to be, among other things, matured in a warehouse in Scotland in oak casks for a minimum of 3 years. This means that from the day you finally get your distillery set up, producing spirit, and filling casks you’ve got at least 36 months to wait before you can bottle and sell anything. Of course, a lot of whisky spends even longer in the barrel but 3 years to wait, once you’ve finally got your still running, is a long time to be without a product to sell.
Unsurprisingly, there are a whole lot of companies who would like to tell you that they’ve cracked how to speed up the process. That might not let them call their whisky Single Malt Scotch, but they claim that they can give you all the flavour and all the character of the real thing without the three-year wait. And if there’s anything we really hate today it’s having to wait for things. Some approaches tinker with the barrel ageing conditions, some use tiny barrels or wood staves, and some even use ultrasonic sound waves. As you might expect, the results of all of these get-whisky-quick schemes are often quite underwhelming. The best of them seem to be pretty good but nothing like a properly aged whisky, with none of the complexity, character or nuance that the real thing has. It seems some things really do just need time.
[Allen Katz of Brooklyn’s New York Distillery] took a pragmatic approach. “Patience is the best ageing for me. From what I’ve experienced to date, if someone comes up with something, I have an open mind. But I haven’t seen anything magically or majestically that says, ‘Boy, I’ve got to drink that.’”
I think I can probably say that over my 15-ish year teaching career, I was able to help some people learn some things. What I can more confidently say is that the vast majority of anything that any of my students learnt from me came not from what I tried to teach them, but simply from us being together, working and thinking and talking, over time. The great American artist John Baldessari said:
“When I think I’m teaching, I’m probably not. When I don’t think I’m teaching, I probably am.”
I am very happy to think that most of what I ever imparted to my students came about slowly, and indirectly. An oblique kind of osmosis that happens through spending sustained time together working around a singular focus. For my students we spent time together, a lot of time in some cases, being philosophers. Or at least trying to be. Figuring out what the shape and scope of what that was and Learning, through the relationships we built with one another, how that might play out.
I know that a lot of what we did when we were together focused on the stuff - learning about particular philosophers, texts, and important ideas. But I also know, because they have frequently told me since, quite unbidden, that almost nothing of that remains with them months or years later. Gleefully, they tell me the crumbs of misremembered facts and theories that have stuck, only to better show how much has fallen away. If the stuff was the real point of it all then that would upset me. Thankfully, it doesn’t, because the stuff was never the point - it was a Trojan horse. We learnt the stuff because it’s what we had to do to do the real learning - the learning how to be. How to be philosophers and how to be human beings.
Let’s leave philosophy for a moment. If someone is learning how to be a chef they’ll spend a lot of time thinking about ingredients and recipes - studying them, learning about them. But those are not the things that really matter they’re just what they use to get to what really matters - learning what it means to be a chef. They’re a means to an end. It was the same for my students. Descartes’ cogito, Plato’s cave, Searle’s Chinese room. All just means to an end. These are just what we were playing around with to help us figure out how to be philosophers. You’ve got to do philosophy of something after all.
That ‘learning-to-be’ is what takes time. Often, a lot of time. And it really can’t be rushed. We learn it through trial and error. We learn it through careful, considered reflection. We learn it through emulation and observation, of teachers and students, and real-life philosophers. We learn it through exploration. Through asking what-if. Through trying new things, and failing, and trying again. We need time to do all of that and there’s no way around it. We need someone, at least, to go with us through that journey. We need someone, at least, to demonstrate, to point and draw our attention, to model and manifest what we’re trying to get our heads around. This kind of learning cannot happen without time or company.
This is why Baldessari says that most of the teaching is happening when he doesn’t think he’s teaching at all. It’s not those times he’s teaching but the times when he’s being that his students can learn the most.
Like so much in our lives today, learning has been accelerated and commodified to try and offer instant results at low costs. Of course, we want to learn, and we want to do it fast. I remember the truly mind-blowing part of watching the first Matrix film as a teenager was not the stopping bullets or wuxia fight theatrics, but the character Trinity downloading into her brain how to fly a helicopter. That was the most exciting moment of all.
Today, we can take short-form classes on YouTube, SkillShare, Udemy, and dozens of other platforms. We can subscribe to apps and services, we can sign up for classes, workshops, and learning communities. They won’t quite deliver on the dream of downloading skills right into your cranium, but they’ll still sell you the idea of rapid learning at a low (monthly) price. Inevitably some of that will be snake oil, people on the grift looking to extract money from those who want, or need, to learn new skills, improve their education, or expand their knowledge. Some of it, though, is high-quality, thoughtful, and impactful learning content. Telling which is which may be the trick, there.
A fair proportion of my current working life is designing, developing, and delivering short-form learning. It’s usually in the guise of face-to-face workshops lasting a couple of days. I think, from my experience as a facilitator, as well as a participant, that these short workshops can be transformative. What’s important, though, is to know just what kind of learning journey can and can’t be condensed into a couple of days together in a workshop, or a well-crafted online learning experience. A simple way of thinking about it might be the distinction between knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values. Knowledge and skills are the stuff whilst attitudes and values are the being.
To clarify this a little, when I’m teaching and training people in learning experience design I often use these categories to help them think about what it is they’re designing. Short-form learning of the kind you’ll get in an online course is a pretty good way of delivering knowledge. Something more interactive and experiential like a workshop is great for also delivering skills. Attitudes and values, the things that relate to what we are learning to be are the things that need time. To go back to my example of philosophy students, a student could easily learn about Descartes’ argument for the ‘cogito’ (I think, therefore I am) from an online resource. So long as it explains things clearly and effectively, that won’t be an issue. They might need something more interactive and experiential, though, to learn how to analyse, critique, and use the argument. A short lesson or workshop would do that no problem. However, to learn to think, write, and talk like a philosopher - to take on board the attitudes and values of being a philosopher - is going to take time. The only way to do that is to spend time with other students and teachers thinking, learning, and exploring together.
In my professional life today I am often working with educators and the same is true there. I can teach them very quickly what the stages of Design Thinking are. A quick video or online resource could do that without any difficulty, too. I could also teach them, through a short workshop, what it means to use those core concepts. How to apply empathy, how to define problems, how to ideate collaboratively, to prototype, and to test. What I can’t do, in the space of a couple of days together, is help them understand what it means to be a design thinker. For that, we need time. Time to experiment, to reflect, to try and to fail, to explore, and to become.
The grail, in all of this, would be to find a way to help people learn to be the thing but without needing to spend the time. Just like the whisky, we want to speed up that slow, organic, unpredictable process.
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Żiżek captures this yearning when he talks about the kinds of products we seem to want today - sugar-free Coke, alcohol-free beer, fat-free chocolate, caffeine-free coffee - we might now add nicotine-free smoking (vaping) and effort-free art (generative AI). What Żiżek points out is that these things are a semblance of the real thing, a simulacra, that appeals to us as a kind of commodity of cultural capitalism. The mistake that is being made, here, is a simple one but a significant one.
When we’re being sold a course that will teach us to be a graphic designer or an app that will teach us to be a Spanish speaker or a workshop that will train us to be a public speaker we’ve fallen into the belief that it is the thing that matters - the end product, the certificate, the outcome. But this is never the case when the learning journey is authentic. Earlier I said that the trick is to be able to tell between the snake oil and the real learning experiences, and this is exactly the litmus test. If the thing that really matters is the end result then it’s a grift. A sham. A way of making you feel like you’ve gained something whilst money is being surreptitiously siphoned from your pocket. The real learning experiences will, instead, be the kinds of opportunity where the process is the point, not the outcome.
This same mistake is made in the Cambrian explosion of generative AI that we see today. Too many people think the point of art is the art itself. It never has been. The point of art is not the art itself but the process of creation. In the same way, the value of learning is often not what is learnt but rather the process and experience of learning.
The experience of learning is where the value resides precisely because the experience is where we become who we become when we learn and the value is in the becoming. Learning, then, is an act of love, in a sense. Love for others, love for ourselves, and love for the world. To value only the outcome is to deny or even suppress the power that is inherent in becoming someone new, someone different, through the experience of learning. There’s a great deal we can do with just a few scant days together and the learning can be deep, abiding, and meaningful when our focus is on the value that emerges from the process and not vaguely construed outcome.
We have to acknowledge that learning to be cannot be other than a slow process. A process spent in one another’s company. A process built out of relationships, interactions, and shared experiences. This clearer sense of how learning works, the forms it may take, and the source of its real value will help us to design, and to undertake, far richer learning experiences. What I do know, from the testimony of all those that I’ve taught before, is that what abides with them is not the stuff we occupied ourselves with but the ways that, together, we learnt to be in the world - as philosophers and as human beings.