When I was working on my book, What Is School For? A Manifesto for Parents, I had many AHA moments while differentiating learning from studying. This is one of them.
The art class in school, when organized as a requirement that students don’t have a choice to opt out, is likely to be studying instead of learning.
The same subject offered by an independent artist, which children had to beg their parents to sign up for, is more likely to be the opposite: learning instead of studying.
It turns out that the subject doesn’t define whether it’s studying or learning, but rather how we organize it and what it does for the audience.
