Learning as a personal experience: James Taylor vs George Polya

How best to learn? How best to build deep personal growth? 

I noted this 1995 advice from James Taylor (in this YouTube), on how to become a 'musician like him':

Be as self-contained as possible, to keep the overheads to a minimum... spend as much time free and lonely as you can. ... I think lonely and free go together... somehow. And then you can’t help but evolve, if you keep your mind open, and you are not denying your experience, not shutting yourself down, not sort of clamping yourself down, or letting other wastes of time come in and claim all of your time. If you keep yourself open and free, then things will happen to you, and you will be educated by them and you will evolve, you will grow.

Is this good advice? Does deep personal growth only happen alone?

To contrast this with George Polya who states in 1966:

Teaching is giving opportunities to students to discover things by themselves.

We might rephrase this as:

To learn, students must be given the opportunity to discover things by themselves.

So in fact Polya is also saying that learning happens by actions of the students, not anyone else.

There are a few things to mention here:

1. We may learn by discovery, we may learn by imitation. Both James Taylor and George Polya are referring to learning by discovery. Learning by imitation, by definition, cannot be done alone.
2. Polya is not excluding that students 'discover together'. What is excluded is learning where each student does not personally experience the discovery from 'not learned' to 'learned'.
3. For Polya, the teacher is responsible that each student experiences their learning.
4. For James Taylor, the student is responsible to 'shut-away' others to experience alone their learning.
5. Polya is referring to learning math, James Taylor to learning to be a singer song writer.
6. Learning math can be organized with others, learning the humanity and introspection that goes into song writing is much about "maintaining one's aloneness", which some might call narcissism, remoteness, egoism, detachment, a religious experience, or even being a hermit.

Both advices are similar: learning is best experienced personally, and sometimes experiences learned alone change what is learned. And one cannot help to note that James Taylor naturally expresses the individual nature of learning in an asocial 'push others away' manner, while George Polya stays in a social and organized setting of teachers and students.

All original content copyright James Litsios, 2022.