“Once upon a time there was a mindless little girl named Little Red Riding Hood “
So begins Ellen Langer’s introduction to her delightful The Power of Mindful Learning.
Long before the word was the trend du jour in education there was Ellen Langer’s Mindfulness (1990) and then The Power of Mindful Learning (1997).
Any mindful child would think:
How come she doesn’t know what her grandmother looks and sounds like? What is wrong with that girl?
How come she is fooled by the wolf?
Makes no sense.
As Langer writes:
“Certain myths and fairy tales help advance a culture by passing on a profound and complex wisdom to succeeding generations. Others, however, deserve to be questioned. This book is about seven pervasive myths, or mindsets, that undermine the process of learning and how we can avoid their debilitating effects in a wide variety of settings.”
So here is her shortlist of the myths and assumptions that bind the mind:
Mindful learning is an approach she defines as:
Unmindful learning is the cruise control of those who’ve been there, done that, know everything and are done with learning.
Think about the implications of this statement:
“Memorizing is a strategy for taking in material that has no personal meaning. ”
Why would we ever ask someone to do that? Why would we ever do it to ourselves?
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