What is andragogy & why you can’t learn new things as you used before as a kid?

Photo by Cash Macanaya on Unsplash

In short, andragogy focuses on how adults learn vs pedagogy who deals with the study of children’s learning.
It emerged as a solution to developing better learning practices for adults because they learn differently from children.

This teaching method is based on a few central ideas:
Adults want to be fully involved in the learning process & they tend to learn from experience/failure (trial and error) rather than acquiring new content just to learn stuff and waste valuable time.
And ultimately adults want to know if that information is useful in real life or not.

Photo by Evgeny Ozerov on Unsplash

When you are an adult, you realize that time is very valuable and you don’t want to waste it acquiring useless information that you won’t need in your daily life, if won’t help you solve the problems you face in real life then that information is not appealing.

You have to trick the brain that information is important so that the learning process will be more smooth and so that no time is wasted on learning and no frustration sets in.
In short, you have to answer yourself the question “what do I need this for?” for short “WHY?”

For example, if you want to change your job and you need to learn other skills, you want to become a data scientist, a programmer, or maybe you want to start a new hobby, then you need to set yourself some intermediate targets to make sure that you will succeed in that task, and always have the big picture in front of you, you can imagine yourself becoming successful and so you will already be more motivated to learn those things when you already imagine all the benefits you will have if you learn those things.
And things are much easier to learn and the information gets sedimented there if you learn them by doing.

Photo by Bogomil Mihaylov on Unsplash

So, don’t forget to:

• set yourself clear targets and answer the question of why you need that information
• learn by doing
• imagine yourself already succeeding to have even more motivation.

Good luck!