If you don’t understand the context of what you know you will miss its application and potential of solving personal and societal problems. Eric Otchere
Change expert Don Wolfe teaches that there are two kinds of learning: informational learning and transformational learning. For the purpose of this article, learning will run synonymously with education. He said informational education deals mostly with the head and accumulation of information without any change. Much of what our educational system in Ghana does is informational. This education produces the middle class professionals whom author Robert Kiyosaki wrote about in his bestseller Rich Dad Poor Dad that they “go to school, get a better class, get a well paid job, and live a comfortable life.” In other words, the essence of this education is personal success.
On the other hand, transformational education empowers individuals to discover a higher purpose for their lives. This category, which we shall call the elite, is totally concerned about personal and societal transformation. They take what they learn, apply them, and make impacts beyond their immediate environment. While informational people are part of the problems of society, transformational people are part of the solution. Are you just informed or transformed?
And so, how can one transcend the mindset of informational learning to become a transformational learner to make his or her life count? If you are truly passionate about making a change in your world, then observe these three processes which every transformational learner goes through.
Education Must Transform You Personally. The foremost essence of education is personal transformation. If what you know does not transform your life, you do not have any basis to teach it to others. What you know must manifest in your life. For many of us, we erroneously believe that the more we know, the more important we become. Thus, we have professors and experts whose lives cannot point to hope in the future. I sincerely think the problem is not about what we learn but its applicability. If you don’t understand the context of what you know you will miss its application and potential of solving personal and societal problems. I fully agree with what Bill Beattie said that, “The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.” The reason why we are where we are as a people is because we are not trained to think through issues and find solutions to them. How? Knowledge, meditation, understanding, application, and evaluation are critical to any personal advancement in life.
Replicate The Same Experience To Transform Others. True teachers are those who know and understand something and do the hard job of communicating it to others. Scientists have it that what makes a concept or theory scientific is when it can be replicated again and again with the same result. In the same token, it’s been proven that if you learn what successful people do, you will get the result they get. This goes for individuals, companies, and even nations. For instance, we read about Singaporeans that after their independence they faced the stack reality of underdevelopment and how to turn their fortunes around. What they did was to send their people abroad to learn all they could and replicate the same principles. And today, what we see in Singapore is total transformation. The superior principle here is that successful people can always teach others the principles that got them where they are in order to get the same results.
Leave The World A Better Place Than You Met It. All our struggles in life are about three things: knowing your purpose, living to your potential, and building systems to help others experience the same. Since creation, there has always been something man is to live for far bigger than himself. That’s leaving the earth better than he met it. Scriptures say it quite eloquently in Genesis 2:15 that, “Then the Lord God took man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and keep it.” The key expression here is ‘tend and keep it.’ According to the Collins Internet-Linked Dictionary, the word ‘tend’ means “to care for” or “to handle or control.” The same source explains the word ‘keep’ as “to have temporary possession or charge of.” We can safely deduce that ‘to tend and keep it’ means to “temporarily control a possession.” Unlike the first man Adam, we have our Edens being our home, career, nation, and the world. Whatever your hands find to do, it must be the best version ever. Ask yourself these life-changing questions: What will the world be like if all people were just like me? Do you think all the inventions would have been made? I believe that each one of us has something that can make the world a better place through deploying our talents, gifts and skills. All our pursuits of education and its application must lead to personal and societal transformation to make the world better.
In this article, we have looked at what true learning or education is. At the heart of true education is transformation. I am totally for an informational education which has strategies to cause transformational changes. I cannot agree more with Herbert Spencer who once explained that, “The great aim of education is not knowledge, but action.” Knowledge without action is mere theory. Again, strive for transformational education.
