Learner's Learner: Peter Lee Kline

Peter Lee Kline was an oppressed “slow learner” in school and college.

“I had come to believe,” Kline writes in his 1988 book, The Everyday Genius, “that a certain level of pain and distress was necessary in order to make learning happen.”

Frustrated with how innate human abilities were ignored, he set out with phenomenal drive and energy to discover, integrate, and spread existing knowledge of how people learn best and how to learn faster.

Fortunately, for other slow learners, including me, Kline was successful in his search.

But more importantly, he went on to popularize his findings in several lucid, easy-to-understand books that were brimming with the knowledge of how to learn or teach anything rapidly, all of it infused with that old democratic goal of liberating everyone everywhere.

In The Everyday Genius (page 59), he writes: “People can learn faster—and with greater depth of mastery and enjoyment—than ever before thought possible. If you act on this belief, you can accomplish results of a different order of excellence. Stop believing in limitations, and recognize that natural learning should proceed five times as rapidly, or more, than previously accepted standards would prepare us to anticipate.”

His belief in the transformative power of helping people learn faster, that he expressed in his first book, remains undiminished at the age of 69.

I first met Peter Kline, and heard about his books, in the late 1990s in Chicago at a session of a Learning Group of employment and training grantees of the Joyce Foundation and the James Irvine Foundation.

Prior to the session, my input to the group’s facilitator, Julia Parzen, was that our main challenge at the Jobs for Homeless Consortium in Oakland and Berkeley was how to help our clients learn faster; I was afraid, I explained to her, that, as the welfare-to-work clock wound down, our clients would become orphans of the new dispensation.

Could she find a trainer for the session who could introduce us to how to speed up our clients’ learning, using methods that were consistent with our client-centered, building-on-strengths approach?

Julia (who had become the group's facilitator with the kudos of James Irvine's Craig Howard), in her usual astute fashion, came up with Peter Kline.

Kline's theory and practice not only reinforced for me the importance of what we were doing at the Jobs for Homeless Consortium in addressing our clients' emotional and physical needs, and making learning fun in our interactive job preparation workshop (Taking Possession of Your Skills and Feeling Good About Yourself), but they also opened up many possibilities of what we could do in training our staff and clients to help them learn faster.

Subsequently, I invited Kline to come out to California to train all our managers and the service leaders of several other agencies in his integrated learning methods.

As a result, at the Jobs for Homeless Consortium, we developed new employment training modules that incorporated Kline’s approach to learning, which capitalized on the learner's multiple intelligences (click here for more on multiple intelligences) and responded to her/his individual learning style(s) (click here for more on learning styles).

I recently asked Stephanie Ross, who also represented Jobs Consortium at the Chicago session with Kline, and later attended his trainings in California, what she had learned from Kline.

“Michael, there are so many lessons that I carry with me, whenever I'm helping someone learn a new task, including expecting high levels of intelligence,” she wrote back in a recent e-mail, stressing an underlying Kline motto: Never underestimate the learner's intelligence.

She found his lessons to be of critical importance because when people had helped her to learn over the years, they were so reluctant to use intelligence and creativity.

“One goal of mine," added Stephanie, "is to own a community meeting place where I will provide resources, learning opportunities, and micro enterprise development workshops. The lessons from Peter Kline and The Everyday Genius are guiding principles on which my workshops will be built.

“In particular, my focus is to reduce emotional barriers to learning with fun, thought-provoking, and mind-stimulating exercises, while addressing other barriers such as basic physical needs and environment.”

Many are the persons who have been touched by the genius of this celebrator of the genius of everyone everywhere, on whose face a smile plays throughout his learner-centered learning sessions as he works his magic to reduce emotional barriers and make learning fun.

Michael Chacko Daniels, Editor & Publisher
New River Free Press International

All views expressed in the interview are those of the interviewee

and not those of the editor or this website.

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