Learning Unlearning: Learning and unlearning go hand in hand

I am very much a part of the growing consensus that we, as individuals and as societies, need to change our behaviors and systems if we hope to eradicate the inequities these behaviors and systems uphold. While change often involves struggle and discomfort, I have learned to embrace it. Learned, being the operative word, meaning that overtime my cumulative experience with change taught me that I can count on it to be a conduit for good things in my life. 

Learning, as defined in psychology, explores the relationship between experiences and behaviors. Specifically, Associative Learning is the process of connecting experiences and forming a condition between them. Without diving too deeply into theory, and staying within the amateaur realm (as I am NOT a psychologist) conditioning is something humans can change. By combining incentives or other motivations with observations and experiences humans have developed learning methods that associate one thing with another. The same way a pet dog can be trained to bark on command, or in other words learn to associate a sound (a human saying “bark!) with an action (actually barking), humans can train and learn a variety of conditionings. 

Luckily, we can also unlearn these conditionings. At times conditioning is created without our awareness or control. In others the conditioning is a product of a model or value system that we no longer subscribe to. While this is inevitable and not always the result of negative intentions, we occasionally may attempt to change the conditioning we have learned earlier in our lives and disassociate one experience with others. We try to unlearn that what was true for our old self isn’t necessarily so for who we are and where we are now. 

The colloquial and popularized use of the term unlearning often emphasizes that we need to distance ourselves from and remove toxic value systems from our lives. Without a doubt, something I encourage myself and anyone to do, in an ongoing way. And while identifying these toxic systems is a necessary step, what comes next? Even when placed within a completely justice-oriented society, a person who supposedly unlearned racism, sexism, ageism, or ableism must embark on a journey to learn something new. Indeed, learning something new requires identifying a behavioral pattern that exists in your head and actively seeking new experiences through which you can form a new conditioning, thus replacing the existing one. When placed in the arch of a process, hand in hand with learning, the concept of unlearning becomes less idealistic and the binary divide between the two concepts disappears. Unlearning is a step towards learning something new.