“That’s wrong!”
“Don’t do it that way!”
“Stop! Don’t repeat that again.”
Learning something new is a triumph. Learning, meaning the ability to internalize an idea so that one can recall, restate, compare and contrast the idea against other ideas, and use the idea to justify future actions is a significant intellectual achievement. Learning a physical or manipulative skill to the degree that one can repeat the skill with efficiency and accuracy is equally significant. We celebrate these types of learning.
But – what if the idea learned is incorrect? What if the reasoning behind the idea is flawed and wrong? What if the outcome that a learned skill produces no longer is the outcome wanted? Properly learned ideas and skills are strategically developed with practice and reinforcement so that they are ingrained in our intellectual and muscle memories. Proper repetition makes these learnings stronger. That is what education for the purpose of causing learning is designed to do.
How then do we unlearn an idea that we do not want to know or a skill set we do not want to repeat?
I find support for this dilemma in the Harvard Business Review.
“Unlearning is not about forgetting. It’s about the ability to choose an alternative mental model or paradigm. When we learn, we add new skills or knowledge to what we already know. When we unlearn, we step outside the mental model in order to choose a different one.
As an example, last summer I rented a car to travel around Great Britain. I had never driven this kind of car before, so I had to learn the placement of the various controls. I also had to learn how to drive on the left side of the road. All of that was relatively easy. The hard part was unlearning how to drive on the right. I had to keep telling myself to “stay left.” It’s the reason crosswalks in London have reminders for pedestrians to “look right.” It’s not easy to unlearn the mental habits that no longer serve us.”
“The good news is that practicing unlearning will make it easier and quicker to make the shifts as your brain adapts. (It’s a process called neuroplasticity.)”
https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-the-problem-with-learning-is-unlearning
Consider a child who inadvertently learns that 2 + 2 = 5. Somehow, when counting on fingers or manipulating sticks or doing simple addition problems, the child always arrived at the answer “5.” When asked how many dollars a person who has two dollars and is given two more dollars would have, the child always says, “Five dollars.” This is an idea that has been intellectually learned but it is a wrong and incorrect idea.
Try telling this child that the correct answer is “four” and that whenever he or she is confronted with 2 + 2 in the future, the correct answer is 4. Like a rubber band snapping back to its original shape, the child will say “2 + 2 = 5.” Learning is powerful because it is meant to be remembered and repeatable.
Unteaching is required for unlearning. We need to expend as much effort in teaching a child to unlearn a wrong idea or unwanted skill set as we initially expended in the initial learning. Unteaching is purposeful. Unteaching is based upon sound learning theories and practices. Unteaching takes time and almost always is a one-to-one proposition. Unteaching is essential if we want students to have correct and accurate understandings and contemporary and required skill sets.
I find no research that illuminates the quantity of learning that is incorrect or inaccurate or wrong. Research typically points in the other direction – learning achievements. However, any school person with reasonable hearing and vision and a sensitivity to accurate and supported ideas and refined, purposeful skill sets cringes with frequency when incorrect facts, unsupported reasoning, mispronunciation, incorrect answers and misshaped products are slung about without correction.
The requirement is this: When educators discern learning that is wrong, incorrect, unsupported, incomplete, and that creates errors in judgement and productivity, educators must take the time to unteach what is wrong and then teach what is right.
The work it takes to achieve our mistakes requires double the work to achieve our successes, because we must first unlearn what is wrong. If we are not willing to engage in unteaching for unlearning as a requisite for new learning, then we must befriend our mistakes and every future error that our mistakes will create.