Can everybody learn something new?
There are lots of rooms in the word 'learning'. There is learning facts, which anybody can do, and you always see taxi drivers in London who have to learn 'the knowledge'. They are very often the kind of people who didn't get very far with education. They might have left school at 15 or 16 and not done A-levels, and probably were told that they were not very academic. And then, by the oddity of the British, or the London taxi service, they had to do a memory test which has no equal anywhere in the world. It's an astonishing feat of learning and memorizing, and they find they can do it. When they first realize what they have to do, some of them freak out, but they are taught learning techniques, and above all, they learn confidence. They realize that this strange piece of grey tissue in their skull is capable of learning absolutely anything. And there is no limit to it. Nothing falls out the other side when you push a piece of knowledge to learn in one ear. It doesn't fall out the other because it's not a packed room with solid walls. They are elastic walls. Exactly the opposite of what Sherlock Holmes said, when he said, I shall do my best to forget whether the sun goes around the moon or the moon goes around the Earth, or whatever it is, because I need to know my facts, and there isn't room for enough. That's nonsense. Sometimes as you age, it's a bit like picking things up off the floor. It's a lot more effort to lean down and actually find that fact on the floor of your mind, it's a little less accessible. The filing system seems to go sometimes, which is a mixture of strange affinities and associations that you can't quite put a name to. But the fact is that's one form of learning, just simply learning facts, knowing that the Battle of Agincourt was in 1415 is a fact. It's not a very interesting one, it doesn't tell you much, but knowing what the 15th century was like, that suddenly is a different sort of learning. That is a connective learning. The facts may well be the bricks which you need to make that edifice of the 15th century live in your mind, if you're interested in the 15th century, but it's not the same sort of learning, and it can't be got in the same way that 'the knowledge' is got for a taxi driver.
