Performative Learning

Learning a language is a good lens to view how learning does and doesn’t work.

Take Duolingo or any popular language learning app, it is 95% masturbatory learning. You are “learning” in the sense that you are memorizing things, but it is not developing your skills in a way that is actually useful beyond learning some phrases that you can awkwardly stumble through the next time you’re on vacation.

Duolingo is set up to make you feel very productive. You get a progress bar, awards, points, and a sense that you are really making progress. They make it very easy to share and show your friends how much you’re learning, but in reality, a much more effective way to learn a language would be to simply throw on Peppa Pig in a language you want to know and sit there watching it until you start to get it.

Watching kid’s TV may not make you feel like you’re learning anything, but you will actually be learning how to use the skill, not practicing performative learning.

You won’t know any of the terminology or jargon of learning, you won’t know what you know and what you don’t know, but if you encounter someone who actually speaks that language you’ll have a good chance of actually communicating with that person.

Truly learning something requires a long stretch of time of doing “the thing” without thinking about if you are learning or not learning. It requires a certain faith in the process and more importantly a change of identity to someone who knows how to do “the thing”.

You go from the freedom and ease of learning with no responsibility to having full responsibility with very little conscious sense for what you are learning. You develop a deeper and more practical ability to use the skill to create results in the world.

In the language example, you forget about nouns, verbs, and tenses and instead develop an instinctual feel for connecting with others using the language. Your conscious awareness of the skill fades into the background as you are focused on the results you are creating.

You eventually almost forget the actual process of learning and start saying things like “I don’t know I just picked it up over time” when people ask you how you learned.

If this performative learning is not useful, why does it account for almost every education business that exists? Because the reality is most people don’t actually want to learn things, they want the status/identity & experience of someone who is learning that thing. They want the progress bar, pats on the back, and certificates. They want the freedom from responsibility and criticism that comes from being in a phase of learning but don’t want the real experience of being someone who knows how to do the thing.