How Pablo Ruiz Picasso became... Picasso

And what we can learn from it about creating a deep education

In the 1970s Ference Marton and Roger Säljö introduced the concepts of shallow and deep learning into our understanding of education. Their discovery fills gaps in our understanding of the learning process. It helps us understand how someone like Enrico Fermi could calculate the yield of a nuclear blast on the fly. And it offers us a key to how we evolve our understanding of learning for the future. 

So why aren’t our children learning deeply?

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This is more than an academic interest for me. After all, I’m trying to create a world class education. For my son, but also for myself. An education that combines rigor with understanding, depth with aliveness, and creativity with wisdom. That question — what is a world class education and how do I create it? — is what I’m really wrestling with. 

Let’s return to Marton and Säljö’s research. They had students read a passage, and then they asked the meaning of the passage. But they also asked how they had read the material. And from those answers, they discovered shallow and deep learning.

Shallow learning focuses on memorizing information. Deep learning focuses on understanding it, connecting it to other information, figuring out its structure and how it might be useful, and making predictions based on it.

So deep learning is good and shallow learning is bad?

Well, not so fast.

Not all knowledge has to be deep. To use a trivial example, we don’t need our kids to have a deep understanding of the fluid mechanics of a liquid entering a bowl nor the history of how that bowl has evolved throughout the ages. We just need them to learn to use the toilet.

Deep knowledge has to be built upon a solid foundation of shallow knowledge. You can’t connect information if you don’t know it. And you certainly can’t see beyond that information without it. We say that we stand on the shoulders of giants, but if we don’t learn what they know, we’ll never gain a foothold.

Students who practice shallow learning score about the same on multiple choice and fill in the blank tests. But when asked to connect ideas, the students who practice deep learning far outshine their peers. It’s the difference between regurgitating facts and transcending them. 

The ideas of shallow and deep learning are relatively new, but the way deep learners connect knowledge to what they already know and what they're curious about has existed for centuries. There have always been geniuses who could transcend their world. To state something obvious, we could learn a lot by studying how they did it.

From an early age, Pablo Ruiz Picasso’s father recognized a proclivity for art in his child. Thankfully for history, he chose to nurture it. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, was an established artist and art teacher. As early as five, he taught Pablo to draw. By seven he was teaching him how to paint with oil, and Picasso’s first painting was accomplished as an eight year old. The painting, The Little Yellow Picador, was inspired by a bull fight his father took him to. 

Picasso’s love of art became an obsession early on. He would cry and throw tantrums when he had to go to school rather than draw, and was usually doodling or sketching rather than listening to his teacher. 

His parents quickly realized that his obsession and talent were always going to win over any interest in academics, and they chose to honor it. They let him skip school regularly. They took him to museums and galleries. They nurtured his drawing and painting, and at 13, his father enrolled him in the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. By the age of 16, his father convinced Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the top art school in Spain, to let his son apply. Pablo was accepted, but found it boring and quickly dropped out to pursue his own work. 

It wasn’t long before Picasso had entered his blue phase. The rest, as they say, is history.

Picasso’s genius is interesting, in the way all extreme outcomes are interesting. His art is beautiful and haunting and historically consequential. But what I found fascinating is the way he learned to find his own genius. Picasso was a classically trained artist, who had a solid foundation in the technical aspects of academic art. Many of his paintings show a strong control of colors along with an understanding of anatomy and composition that he learned from his father’s formal teaching. It was this foundation that allowed Picasso to move beyond classical art. He understood art so well that he reinvented it. 

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What was it that allowed Picasso to become Picasso?

That story starts with his father.

His father set really high expectations with a solid technical foundation.

José Ruiz Blasco was a classically trained, disciplined, rigorous artist. When he set out to teach his son, he ensured that Picasso had solid technical skills. At five, Picasso was copying master painters and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. His father would help him make these drawings for hours, and it was only after two years of this drawing instruction that he taught him how to paint. By the end of that training, Picasso deeply understood line drawing, perspective, and realistic representation. His drawing ability would always be his strongest artistic asset.

A world class education is built upon the foundations. Whether its ancient languages, original texts, artistic techniques, or scientific papers, the foundation must be laid before you can go beyond it. It’s also built upon really high expectations. Maybe even unreasonably high. I think anything less is disrespectful to our kids.

Blasco treated his son like an apprentice, rather than another student.

Blasco famously encouraged young Picasso to copy his drawings. He would take him to museums and encourage him to reproduce the work of the masters he saw. He pushed him to refine his skills, while encouraging the young boy along the way. He taught as a master teaches an apprentice, not as a schoolteacher teaches a pupil. Academic knowledge practiced over and over. When his son showed promise, not only did he encourage him privately, but he helped him exhibit it publicly.

I think creating a world class education is actually downstream of working on world-class worthy problems. In our current model, we’ve infantilized childhood, and in the process we lost respect for our students. We’re teaching subjects “just in case” the student needs the information. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If we help our kids choose a world class problem and show them how to work on it, we offer them agency. If we believe their efforts are worthy, we show them respect. 

Even if Picasso had later decided he didn’t want to paint, the time pursuing mastery of painting would have paid off. Excellence is a choice, and it’s worth figuring out how to teach excellence to our children. I’d also bet we’d have a lot more confidence in their future if we knew they had learned how to approach excellence in any subject.

He made sure his son was part of an artistic scene.

In 1891, Picasso’s family moved to A Coruña. The move exposed young Picasso to a completely different culture from the one he was born into. His father also enrolled him in the School of Fine Arts to allow him to study art full time, even though he was only 11. Four years later, Blasco moved the family to Barcelona because he believed his son would benefit from the vibrant artistic community there. In Barcelona, Picasso’s talents continued to expand as new peers pushed him. As he outgrew that community, he was accepted into Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando as a 16 year old. He only stayed a few months before departing for Paris to join the artists community there. 

I think creating a world class education is as much about creating the environment — and the people in it — as it is about the subject material. Picasso’s father uprooted their lives to offer his son entry into the best art scenes in Spain. We choose to simply accept whoever our kids become friends with at school. Our children rarely get to meet interesting, passionate, accomplished people, much less become peers with them. But it’s precisely these people that best understand what a world class education could be. 

Blasco really encouraged young Picasso. Not praise, but genuine encouragement

In A Coruña, Blasco helped his young son to exhibit his work. At only 13, Picasso had his first formal exhibition. It proved to be a pivotal moment in his career, one that wouldn’t have happened without his father’s continued support. 

There’s an almost mythic story about Blasco’s tutorship. The father found 13 year old Picasso painting over one of his own sketches of a pigeon. He could have easily gotten upset. He probably had a right to be angry. But he didn’t. Instead, he made a show of laying down his brushes and declaring that he would never paint again now that his son had surpassed his talents. He made sure his son knew he was a fan. And even though he did paint again, the scene speaks volumes.

What if a world class education is about both the grand quest and the small encouragements, those little moments when someone believes in you and helps you to keep going? To push farther. Creating a world class education seems to mean finding or creating those moments. That’s what I’m trying to do with my kids. It’s what I’m trying to do for myself as well. And I hope I can be just as cheesy and over the top as José Ruiz Blasco was with his son.

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Picasso and his father didn’t always have a happy relationship. I don’t want to paint this as some idyllic fairy tale. As he began to explore art beyond his academic training, his relationship with his father suffered. But I suspect that says more about José Ruiz Blasco as a mentor than it does about him as a teacher. He was a master whose apprentice surpassed him, and that’s hard on any master. I imagine it’s even harder when the apprentice is your son. 

However, José Ruiz Blasco’s influence on Picasso was evident long after their relationship faltered. Picasso’s father may not have had the technical language to tell us exactly what he was doing with his son, but we can look back at his story and see how they created the conditions for a deep education in art:

• Unreasonably high expectations build on a solid technical foundation

• Apprenticeship rather than teaching. We should be teaching our kids how to pursue excellence, not how to regurgitate facts.

• Creating an environment and a scene that supports their education

• Encouragement rather than praise

Blasco’s experience is a case study in how to create a world class education.

That education that turned Pablo Ruiz Picasso, the boy, into Picasso, the artist.

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