People learn in different ways. A teenage girl was sent to my office, in danger of being thrown out of her third high school for disruptive behavior and failing grades. Our conversations revealed that she was quite bright and learned best by doing, using her hands, or interacting with others, and that she got very little out of lectures or films. She was a tactile / kinesthetic learner, and audio/visual instruction left her bored and frustrated. Working with her teachers to tweak her educational structure at school, her behavior and her grades improved and she successfully graduated with her class. Last I heard from her she had gotten a job she loved at a flower shop where she used her hands and talked to people all day. Learning how she learned significantly changed her life’s path.
We sometimes expect people to learn from exposure to facts but often they don’t. When people are attached to a belief system you can throw facts that contradict their beliefs at them all day long and see very little change. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote: "The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of critical thinking. When faced with the choice of changing one’s mind or proving the that there is no need to do so—almost everybody gets busy trying to find the proof.” Or, as Jerry Garcia sang: “You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t want to know”. ( https://quotationcelebration.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/you-aint-gonna-learn-what-you-dont-wanna-know-jerry-garcia/ )
We learn by engaging with information in ways that allow the content to enter our thought process. Visual, auditory, and kinesthetic are the most common methods of engagement, and most people can use some combination of them. Someone like my teenage client who has pretty much one dominant learning style are often labeled lazy or stupid, as she was, when in reality they just experience and think differently than the norm. It makes sense that we are more open to new information if we are presented with it in a way that is in sync with our learning style. More importantly, it is the willingness to consider points of view that differ from our own that keeps our cognitive juices flowing and invites us to engage in critical thinking. Without engaging our thinking process, we might memorize but we will not really learn. So be curious and explore new things and ideas, and in the process, you just might learn more about yourself.