what is "learning"?

- how to do things
- how to categorize
- how to know relevance from irrelevance
- how to improve
- how to avoid folly and repeated folly
- how to use your experience
- how to gain experience
- how to use the best tactic and strategy

...etc.

What you speak of "moulding minds" is usually branwash or suggestion, which is direct appealing to the group think and flock instinct, describe by Sigmund Freud. People strong enough can see the relevance and irrelevance in bad teachings and are thereby less prone to be brainwashed/manipulated.

Children are inherently prone to brainwash/suggestion as they naturally will undergo a phase where they are open to being raised by their parents or other authorityt figures. Over time it will vane, and speciall as teens they will mature and raise conflicts.

Most will still have major areas where they are still weak towards suggestion/group think and flok instinct. Just look how the fashion industry with their powerful marketing can make people wear ugly cloth, buy useless junk ..just because it has good marketing backup.

So while we'r still able to learn, and be very superior in various diciplins of math, linguistic, althetics ..etc, we are still weak sheeps in others.

but isn't true that we are all "brainwashed" to a point, and that brainwashing is that we call our "individuality"?

Yes, indeed, we are brainwashed to know what is righ and wrong, by ethics, morals and laws ..and specially the unwritten laws. When I really understood this, was when watching Gulfwar II (Iraq war) when some civilian japaneese prisoners were released from being hostages, they would run crying out to freedom overwhelmed by shame covering their faces, where everybody else would run out cheerfully. It's due to their deeply rooted culture that will cause their upbringing to live by these ideals.

Memory and learning are processed through the brain; the genes and the environment impacts the individual from the time they become aware of their environment. Some are of higher order than others, but humans were able to make tools early in our evolution based on our ability to grasp objects.

The one mystery that hasn't been answered - for me at least - is the simple fact that some children are able to do complex math and compose music at a very early age.

It has been said that humans to not use the maximum potential of our brains, and I believe that is true.

These prodegy savants that you are speaking of, I belive is due to random mutation of the zygots. You can't raise children to be prodigy savants, however with intensive training people can exceed many thousand fold of their expected average.

Well said in my opinion. You come across very smart at times.
I do question your neurophilosophy on this though [People strong enough ] What do you mean by People strong enough?

Learning is the process of taking into yourself what you previously percieved as alien to you.

A child cannot help but be brainwashed, as a child much of what is learned is acquired without conscious attempts to acquire it. The child's brain is wired in a such a way. Moral rational choice making, weighing pro's and con's, learning from other people's mistakes (analytic projection) etc... does not happen on a large scale until closer to puberty.

learning is fluid changes in behavior.

To take desicions that goes against your nature, that will make you able to take unpopular choises, something that will make you extremely unpopular ..etc.

Blah! ..hate when I write pleonasms!

learning is through observation , read , experienced , questioning , strengh of will at times , thinking outside the box sometimes and reasoning