What I think About Learning, Choice, and Getting Out of Kids' Way

I rarely ever get the chance to join any parent meetup partly because I'd probably be a misfit sitting in between but I joined one recently just to observe. Parents sharing real concerns and real observations about education. The main thread running through everything: school vs. out-of-school learning, and how on earth do you even choose?

The Question Everyone's Sitting With

It started with a parent voicing something a lot of people in the room were clearly feeling: there are so many schools, so many out-of-school institutions, so many courses but how do you know which one to pick? At which age? For which subject? Towards which path?

The overwhelm is real. And honestly, I don't think it's going away anytime soon.

Find the Interest First — Everything Else Follows

Shuja and Pasha, (TSE community leaders), kept coming back to one piece of advice, and it's deceptively simple: find the interest first. Whether you're starting out yourself or guiding your kid before you pick a course, a platform, or a system figure out what actually pulls their interest in. Research that. Explore that. Then the learning follows at its own pace, naturally.

It sounds obvious. But most people skip it. They go straight to "which course is best" without stopping to ask "best for whom, and for what?"

How We Actually Learn

Shuja mentioned a resource that I think deserves more attention the Learning How to Learn course by Barbara Oakley. It's one of those things that reframes the whole exercise, because before you pick what to learn, it helps to understand how learning actually works.

And funny enough, when he brought it up I instinctively opened my Coursera and there it was, sitting in my account with an assignment still due. It's now in my calendar. So that's happening.

This connects to something I genuinely believe: anyone can learn anything. Not as a motivational poster statement, but as something I've actually watched play out including in my own career.

When you step into professional life, you learn things because you have to. Deadlines, deliverables, no excuses. But for me, it never felt like the dull corporate checkbox exercise it's made out to be. Even when something was purely for a project or a deadline, I found myself genuinely enjoying it abssorbed in it in a way I didn't expect. I kept the door open for curiosity, and that made all the difference. The job gave me the push, but the enjoyment was always real.

The further you go into your career though, the more outside constraints close in. Time, responsibilities, expectations. There's less room to just wander.

But kids don't have that problem. And that's kind of extraordinary when you think about it.

They have time. They have energy. Zero job responsibilities, zero performance anxiety unless we hand it to them. They can just do things. Try things. Drop things. Pick up other things. There's no "what's the ROI on this?" running quietly in the background.

So I find myself wondering and I say this as an observer, not a parent, so please don't come at me 😄 — why do we impose our own limitations on them? Why do we rush them toward goals before they've even had a chance to figure out what interests them?

Just Start. That's the Step.

When the conversation turned to just taking that first step, he brought up how he started learning German and it was about as unglamorous as it gets. It was a random decision of mine to join their german learning, I didnt have any plans, no academic goal, no certificate in mind. Just idle curiosity and a group of people doing something interesting together.

We started of with duolingo and writing a few words in german (btw I am on a 500 day streak now 🔥XD), There was no course, We started with a few words. Und jetzt kann ich Sätze auf Deutsch schreiben und mich in einfachen Gesprächen verständigen.

The point wasn't the German. The point was that the only thing that got us started was the decision to start. Sometimes we get into the phase of making plans and finding a perfect course but often times its not even necessary.

This is exactly why the Learning How to Learn conversation matters so much it's about the mindset before the method

It also connects to why The STEM Educators started in the first place. The makers movement wasn't built around teaching kids to code it was built around the idea of just learning things and making things. And what naturally comes out of that is a way of thinking: how to break a problem down, how to strip it to its essentials, how to work through it step by step. Abstraction. Decomposition. Problem-solving. These aren't just coding concepts they're the fundamentals of how good thinkers think. Coding just happens to be one of the cleaner ways to teach them.

The first step was just taking the step. That's it.

Shuja makes this point often when he's on calls with parents: it's not about turning your kid into a programmer or positioning them for the AI boom. It's about developing a thinking framework a problem-solving mindset that will serve them in whatever field or path they end up choosing.

School Educatoin vs. Out-of-School Education— The Debate That Refuses to Die

Pasha asked a question that opened things up: which matters more, school education or out-of-school education? Parents weighed in how schools often miss certain skills, how the matric vs. O-levels debate keeps circling without resolution, how do you even decide which system is "better"?

Here's where I landed: it's not about the system. Someone from matric isn't coming out lesser than someone from O-levels. It's about the choices made, the experiences sought, the curiosity pursued outside of whatever box the curriculum puts you in.

I went to a matric school. Looking back, school education was never enough for me not because the school was bad, but because I was always reaching for things outside it. The random rabbit holes, the self-directed exploring, the things I picked up just because I was curious that's what shaped me. Without those outside experiences, I'd be a completely different person. I'm fairly certain of that.

Which is maybe the whole point. The system matters less than the learner inside it.

What struck me most about the entire conversation wasn't any single answer it was the fact that the parents asking the hardest questions were already doing something right. Showing up. Thinking about it. Not just defaulting to whatever everyone else is doing.

The honest truth is there's no perfect curriculum, no correct system, no single course that unlocks your kid's potential. What there is, is curiosity and the choice to protect it instead of redirect it. Every resource below is only useful if the interest is already there. Find that first. The rest is just tools.