Two obstracles to learning

Two obstacles to learning

Let’s talk about learning in the broadest sense – learning maths, learning a foreign language, learning how to drive, how to use a computer, learning how to love, how to listen to others etc. Let’s put all of the above in the same category: ‘learning’. Let’s focus now on ‘obstacles to learning’ and more specifically on what I consider to be the two main obstacles. One is purely psychological, the other is purely physical. I have experienced both here, in Rwanda (and in many other places, of course.)
Psychological obstacle
We all know it. It goes: ‘No, I can’t learn this! It’s too difficult for me! I am too old. I don’t really need or want to learn this...’I have personally experienced this obstacle: ‘Learning Kinyarwanda? Too difficult – Bantu languages SO different from Indo-European languages, my brain is too old, where else would I need Kinyarwanda, besides Burundi...’ Result: I have only learned greetings in two months.
Example two. Workshop for teachers at the Jesuit school in Kigali where I was invited to give an informal talk about bilingual education. Before starting, I noticed that all male teachers were sitting on my left and all female teachers on my right. ‘Is this a coincidence’, I asked jokingly. They simply said ‘no’. OK... I went on with my interactive presentation, code switching between English and French all the time, to show how easily it can be done in a bilingual school... and I quickly discovered that the divide was not made along gender differences but along a linguistic divide. Men, who were the younger group had all embraced the challenge of learning English – one of them told us how he did it: listening to BBC radio and Voice of America every day, writing down unfamiliar words, looking them up in a dictionary, reading the English language Rwanda newspaper (‘the New Times) every day. He said that after four months he could understand everything and was able to start expressing himself confidently. I applauded him and told the rest of the group: ‘See, it can be done. On my right was the ‘No, can’t do it’ group, the older group, the women. A coincidence? No. A proof that men are smarter than women? No way, José! It is clear than an elderly wife-mother-full time teacher will be less available to tackle the task of learning a new language on her own. So the ‘I am too old, I am too busy, I have no real desire to do it, I have taught in French for the last 15 years, why change now?, let the young men do it’ will interfere with the learning process... Psychological barrier, a phenomenon well documented by a Bulgarian psychiatrist named Lozanov (worth reading...)! I doubt that these women will ever learn English, but I did not tell them that...
Obstacle 2
‘Yes, I want to learn, I know I can do it, and I’ll show you how easy it is..... BUT sorry, we have no ‘New Times’ or any other reading material to give you. No electricity, no radio, no CD to listen to. No transport to access them either... A minimum of material conditions are required to be able to learn anything (including to learn how to really love? Perhaps...). I am not talking about falling into the trap of educational gadgets consumerism, I am talking about basic infrastructures and material to get started on the road to learning. This is why my gamble at Rugerero is to provide pupils with as much learning and teaching material as possible and show the teachers what can be done with basic ingredients to feed any learning hunger. This is why I am bringing more staple food from Kigali to feed those who are starving, who suffer from learning deprivation... No, not everybody can learn calculus, understand James Joyce, or play Paganini on his/her violin, but MANY more people than those who actually do the above potentially can. And EVERYBODY potentially can pass the entrance examination to secondary education in Rwanda!