Learning to learn is a very common phrase these days. I don't like it much because we know how to learn from birth. We build MOPs and TOPs effortlessly, and we respond to expectation failures automatically by building explanations. The phrase “learning to learn” refers to the idea that learning to do any specific thing is really not all that relevant. The real issue is to get students to the point where they are excited about learning and they want to learn more because doing so is fun. Children (and adults as well) must also believe they can learn. This is often a big problem with kids' internalizing failure in school into an idea that they just are not smart enough (Eckert, 1989). They don't need to learn to learn – they simply need to rely upon the natural learning mechanisms they were born with.

Attitude is critical to continued, lifelong learning and to the development of a keen intellect. People who are closed to new ideas and are unwilling to think cannot really be very intelligent; such people may have had dynamic memories but have gradually become impervious to change. In order to understand what intelligence is and what it is not, we need to get away from the problem-solving view of intelligence (which defines intelligence in terms of how well we have learned how to apply rules we were explicitly taught) and move over to one oriented more toward case-based reasoning, which is the natural outgrowth of a dynamic memory.