The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change – Carl Rogers
If we put aside the contradictory nature of the phrase ‘learning how to learn’ (if one doesn’t know how to learn, then how can one learn even that?), then it becomes one of the key ingredients of a recovery process such as the one Sri Lanka has to go through in the next few years.
Two important aspects of the process would be: a) learning about things we have or have not done in the past for us to be in this situation now, b) changing the way we do things so that similar mistakes are not repeated in the future.
For example, the country needs to have a mechanism to make sure that whatever the loans or foreign aid money we get for the purpose of the recovery will be used only for that in the most efficient and transparent manner.
Since the country is well known for seeking IMF support sixteen times prior to this, the way the country handles money in the seventeenth time most definitely has to be different from previous times.
IMF staff report
Though ‘transparency’ and ‘minimising corruption’ have not been given priority within the policy making and implementation framework of countries like Sri Lanka, the conditions are mentioned more than ten times in the IMF staff report about Sri Lanka, issued in February of 2022. Following is a small paragraph under recommendations from page 2 of that report.
“Renewed efforts are needed on growth-enhancing structural reforms, including increasing female labour force participation, reducing youth unemployment, liberalising trade, developing a wide-reaching and coherent investment promotion strategy, and reforming price controls and State-owned enterprises (SOEs). Efforts to strengthen governance and reduce corruption vulnerabilities should continue.”
Genuine assistance of ‘educated’ people is an essential component of the mechanism of implementing such recommendations in any country. The word ‘educated’ is used here, as defined by Carl Rogers, to describe the ‘ones who have learned how to learn and change’.
There are a lot of people around the world who find out, on their own or through others’ reactions towards their behaviour, that they lack the abilities of critical thinking, time management, money handling, choosing proper investments, business partners or life partners, or suitable careers even after spending so many years in schools and universities.
This usually brings them to the realisation that whatever the knowledge they gathered through formal education is only a tiny fraction of what they need to learn to achieve the type of success they had imagined for their adult life. One might find all types of different sources such as books, videos, seminars, webinars, websites, blogs, online courses, and training camps offering information and training about learning how to learn.
Different theories
Most of such courses and programs focus on different theories of brain functions and how to use that knowledge in the learning process with special attention to learning new things and often they end up learning how to memorise things better and strategies to recall them faster.
According to the psychologist Carl R. Rogers, all people possess an inherent need to grow and achieve their potential and that need of self-actualisation was one of the primary motives driving an individual’s behaviour. Humans would like to feel, experience, and behave in ways which are consistent with their self-image, and which reflect what they would like to be like, their ideal-self.
Roger’s humanistic approach explains that closer our self-image and ideal-self are to each other, the more consistent we are and higher our sense of self-worth too. Therefore, when a person detects an inconsistency between a particular experience and the self-image, then his/her defence mechanisms like denial or repression will be triggered guarding against potential threats to the feelings of the individual by the truth.
As any other life form that will grow to its full potential if the conditions in the environment are right, so will the people reach their full potential if the environment provides the necessary support.
However, when it comes to learning from mistakes, most law makers and high-powered professionals, (some of whom have even achieved high levels of qualifications through respective formal educational systems), responsible for drafting and implementing such policies seemed to have succumbed to the ‘law of diminishing returns.’
High-powered positions
In economics, ‘Law of Diminishing Returns’ describes the diminishing pleasure or satisfaction enjoyed by a consumer as a result of an increase of consumption by one unit. Most people in high-powered positions have shown a diminishing enthusiasm or willingness to learning and changing their way of doing things. Whether it is a Government, a business organisation, a civil organisation, or an educational institute the decision makers and implementers must reflect critically on their own behaviour first and identify the ways they, perhaps inadvertently, contribute to the problems within the organisation and then change how they act.
It is important for them to learn, first and foremost, whether the way they have been defining and solving problems can itself be a source of the subsequent problems. Politicians and professionals who have been successful at what they do rarely experience failure. Therefore, they hardly get a chance to even contemplate how to learn from failure.
Instead, they become defensive, screen out criticism, and place the blame on anyone but themselves. The best opportunity given to them to learn is shut down by them precisely when they need it the most. Defensive reasoning usually blocks the receptors of learning even if the individual is committed to it.
As long as the efforts at learning and change focused on external factors everyone participates enthusiastically. But the moment it focuses on an individual’s own performance they feel threatened and then they assume the defensive positions.
The organisation will not show any improvement unless the improvements start at the top. The best hope for Sri Lankans at their seventeenth trip to IMF is to see those changes from the top all the way to the average citizen with genuine attempts to learn from the mistakes and to be brave enough to change the way they do things.
The writer has served in the higher education sector as an academic over twenty years in the USA and fifteen years in Sri Lanka and he can be contacted at [email protected]