In life, the ability to learn faster than others certainly helps an individual gain a competitive advantage. To thrive in an uncertain and complex world doesn't depend on your team's skills but on those they can acquire. In simple words, learning is a force that brings change. However, the question then is, when it comes to workplace culture, how can your employees develop a learning mindset?

 

The answer is a bit of a mixture of both simple and complex. It is simple because curiosity is something wired into our DNA. But, on the other hand, it is also complicated since our learning approach is broken while we are growing up.  Simply because teachers and parents together keep teaching kids to think like machines. For this reason, scientists have been trying to replicate the wrong mind for years — that of an adult. It is also the fact that teaching machines to defeat a chess master is easy, but machines cannot think like a 4-year-old. 

 

Moreover, the good news is that after 60 years, computer scientists and developmental psychologists have managed to come together and decipher the formula of curiosity, which they found to be hidden in the kindergarten, and not in the adult brain. 

  

It is a fact that we are all born curious; however, unfortunately, we stop exploring, learning, and discovering as we grow up.  Thanks to the education system, we become vulnerable to automation. Schools and colleges prepare children to pass a test instead of nurturing a learning mind, and thereby we appreciate knowing and not the process of learning.

  

As the German data scientist Andreas Schleicher, who is on a mission to change how we teach children, said, "The kinds of things that are easy to teach, and maybe easy to test, are precisely the kinds of things that are easy to digitize and to automate."  

For example, It is easy to learn and test math — robots are pretty good at it. However, younger kids can imagine, create, question, and collaborate in ways that machines cannot yet. 

  

Sanjay Sarma, VP for Open Learning at MIT, thinks that our learning approach is dated — we educate people the same way we trained workers to use machines in the Industrial Revolution. The most important thing in learning is curiosity. We need to build the habit of continuous learning. And, most importantly, better learning. 

 

In other words, the future of education requires shifting the focus from content-oriented academic tests toward measuring adaptive skills, mindsets, and competencies — including empathy and creativity.  Schleicher believes that to change what we treasure, we must first change what we measure,"   

Now, younger kids pay more attention because they are curious, and a child's brain is continually stimulated and challenged. Curiosity generates dopamine, triggering the learning that occurs.  And to develop such a mindset in a child, he/she will need to play to learn and learn to play. As Sanjay Sarma rightly says, "Learning has to become the new rocket science."