Delphic Maxim 6: Know what you have learned

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.

6. Know what you have learned

When you’re doing a teaching degree, one of the fundamental ideas you get taught about in educational psychology is the difference between cognition — the process of thinking and learning — and metacognition, where you are thinking about thinking. I found that this was one of the more powerful lessons early on in a degree, because it acts as a kind of brain hack: you learn how to learn, so your learning gets better and better. Teaching degrees, when done right, kind of get easier as you go through (not the content, necessarily, and the complexity with which you apply concepts gets harder, but the process of learning gets easier).

This is how I read the ‘know what you have learned’ maxim. It’s an expression of this metacognitive faculty we all have, but applied to the things we have already learned.

Learning isn’t a simple, linear process. Aside from it being organic, so it moves in strange and unexpected ways, but it has a strong compounding effect. Learning in one domain — say by reading the Greek classics — improves your ability to learn and understand in another, for example the literature of Dante, Milton, Goethe or even your understanding and enjoyment of Star Wars. This is all a roundabout way of saying there is no end point — so stop trying to imagine one! You learn until you die.

Fair enough. But why is it particularly worth saying that we should know what we have learned? Obviously on a superficial level, once we’ve learned something, it’s valuable to be able to recall it, to play with it, to put it into practice. However, doing so requires something deeper than recall. Our ability to synthesise and create new knowledge out of the things we’ve already learns requires that we know it quite deeply. And part of the process of knowing something deeply is having an understanding of the relationship between different concepts, in knowing how you came to learn something, and also how that knowledge embeds in the network of ideas that comprise your understanding of the world.

The best learning — really the only deep learning — happens when new ideas and knowledge are linked into our existing mental frameworks. In language learning, for example, people often look for cognate words — words that look similar in two different languages (like Apple in English and Apfel in German). When children begin to form their schemas of the world, they begin by inferring rules and generalising from their existing understanding (dog is a four-legged creature, therefore all four-legged creatures are dogs), and then these schemas are updated or new schemas generated based on new information (fluffy four-legged creatures are called ‘sheep’, eight-legged creatures are called ‘spiders’).

All of this is a really long detour through one basic idea: if you know what you have learned, you have taken the time to properly assimilate information. This means you have thought deeply, creatively, synthetically with an idea. You’ve wondered to yourself “how might I use this idea in a new way?” or “how does this concept relate to this other thing? Does it change my understanding of the world at all? Is there a way I can play with these ideas that make them different again?”

This is metacognition at work, and it makes you a better thinker and a better learner.