Active vs. Passive Learning

When my brother and I were little kids, we were sitting around our grandparents' house on the Cape one sunny summer day doing absolutely nothing, waiting for something to entertain us. One of us made the mistake of telling our grandmother that we were bored. She wasted absolutely no time lighting us up, all but physically kicking us out of the hous

A common challenge for people who are curious and love to learn is that we can fall into the habit of continuously force-feeding ourselves more and more information, but never actually take the next step and apply it. We

Traditional learning has some positive aspects, but it also severely limits our approach toward education and how we seek to enrich ourselves. To combat this, we must first take a cue from autodidacts and understand the difference in mindset between reading and regurgitation and intellectual curiosity.

When we talk about learning—as opposed to education—we’re really talking about replacing the traditional, one-way, top-down model of knowledge transmission with an active, connected system that teaches people how to learn. Education is what other people do to you. Learning is what you do to yourself.