Slow learning is deep learning

I hear more and more from my students that they don’t have enough time.

This is a real shame. It’s one thing for lack of time to blight the lives of independent adults. But it’s another thing for college students to feel so pressured that they cannot let their education unfold. Speed kills learning.

Part of the reason for the sense of decreasing time in college is the delusion that learning is information transfer. It’s taken for granted that we need more and more information just to stay upright in a world awash with new data every hour.

People sell executive summaries of new books immediately on publication, so that people don’t actually have to read them in order to suck up the main points. Blinkist predigests books for you and even delivers them in audio formats so you don’t have to read at all!

College students have grown up with pitiless technological attempts to deliver more bits of information into the minds of students more efficiently.

But not everything is information. A well-educated person also needs to be able to speculate, to ruminate, and to imagine. Developing these abilities takes time, but even more important, it takes leisure. We’re killing our future by not giving students the time they need for these abilities to grow and strengthen.

Reading long and complex books slowly trains us to wait while thoughts and feelings settle in. Nothing is more crucial to developing insight than waiting for ideas to root. A thought is like a seed. Once rooted, it can be tended occasionally, but it must grow in its own time. We must wait. Discussing books slowly helps: it’s like watering the growing seed.

A college education that doesn’t rush ideas, that doesn’t demand harried mastery of information, that doesn’t rush through material just to “cover” it, coming just as young people start to move into adulthood, can teach them the need for—and the power of—incubation in the life of the mind.

The demand for instant results not only kills the spontaneous growth of ideas. It also depletes the imagination, which is itself like a plant in many ways. It gains strength from waiting and watching, letting the mind’s eye wander over the budding ideas, watching them grow. A strong imagination is the mind’s fertilizer: it produces faster and more robust growth than could ever be achieved by strain, effort, and artificial deadlines.
Without time to wait and watch it withers and its powers never get strong.

A good college education exercises the imagination in every way possible. It introduces the mind to mathematical objects in order to teach it to see what transcends the physical. It provides time to mull over stories, novels, and plays in order to awaken the inner movie-goer’s spontaneous generation of imaginary characters. It provides time for creative writing as well, and for art of all kinds, both imitative and productive, in order to teach people how to turn an inner vision into an object that all can see.

A good education does not just build up thinkers, it builds up creators.

So, it’s a shame if the college experience evanesces in busyness. It may be the only serious leisure for which modern life leaves some time. And if students fritter away that time hectically amassing information, how will they learn to nurture their souls in the truly trying years of the rest of their lives.

A good college experience, with the leisure to learn how to grow internally, is a lifetime possession.

Fast is shallow. Slow is deep.