Note: kids also often chafe at learning new things, if it feels like someone is telling them what to do. Source: My kids are 2.5 and 5, and I hang out with a lot of other small kids and their parents these days.

Depends on the thing. Children tend to be fine at self-directed learning, e.g. figuring out how to play a new video game. Some—most?—adults chafe at even the idea of engaging in an activity that requires self-directed learning. (To the point that we even have an English word for those adults that don't: "neophiles.")

Some children enjoy playing some new video games. (As do some adults.) Some children (and some adults) would refuse to play a video game that someone else told them to play. Their decisions and feelings are contingent on the context (including social context).

If you slow down and have a conversation you can sometimes figure out what the specific emotional problem is, often involving shame or fear, and what triggers it has. The problem is seldom if ever “so-and-so is incapable of learning anything new”.

> Some children (and some adults) would refuse to play a video game that someone else told them to play.

Well, yes, but coercion, extrinsic motivation, and general spite are all edge-cases, and outside the scope of what the core fact about "learning" that I'm trying to talk about here.

Let's look at a specific non-edge-case case: learning under self-directed intrinsically-motivated reward + time pressure — for example, learning to hunt/gather when stranded in the wilderness and hungry.

In situations like this, children do better than adults at deciding to begin experimenting in an attempt to learn how to survive. Adults will try to apply any skills they already have (however rusty), but will have a much harder time than children do in deciding to try to do things they haven't already ever been taught to do. And even when they do make that decision, they will repeatedly revoke it—i.e. give up much more quickly when a solution does not come easily to them. Even though, in education-theoretic terms, all the stars should be aligned in terms of motivating their learning process.

> The problem is seldom if ever “so-and-so is incapable of learning anything new”.

Of course not. That's the observed abstract pattern, not the reason. The reason for adults, AFAICT, is almost always pride/hubris — that is, the idea that they don't need to learn anything new, that there's no advantage in it to outweigh the learning cost, because they've got by just fine up to now without having learned it. (And also because learning is just plain harder for adults, since they have so many existing schemas that need to be broken+reshaped in the process of fully absorbing new ideas that don't fit the existing schema.)

This resistance comes almost always from adults who see themselves as having higher social status than whoever's trying to teach them the thing. They have no mental schema for learning from someone younger or more junior (or of a lower social class/caste) than themselves, since it's not something they've ever experienced earlier in their lives.

Instead, when someone in an inferior social positions knows a thing, and offers to teach it to this social-superior adult, the adult will instead try to manipulate their social inferior into doing the task for them any time they need it to be done — often under the pretext of demonstration for purpose of learning. But with no intention of actually learning, and a complete rejection on being tested for knowledge acquisition (because that would be a violation of the social dynamic!)

Note also that learning is separate from doing. I know many adults that are willing to do novel things (without really understanding what they're doing), and to memorize that specific series of actions by rote — but who have no desire to understand the more general skill behind the rote actions they're taking, such that they could perform related actions in any context other than the exactly memorized thing. In general, memorizing is easy, while learning a new skill is much, much harder. (And yet memorization without learning almost never "sticks", since there's no backing mental schema to encode the memorized steps in terms of.)

> give up much more quickly when a solution does not come easily to them

Anecdotally, kids often also give up easily when faced with trivial setbacks. I think your speculative generalization is far too broad. I’d be interested to see some concrete research, but my impression is that there is very wide variability, and I’m not sure how meaningful the statistical averages are.

The people I know who are best at diving into a new never-seen thing and experimenting systematically to figure out quickly and accurately how it works are all adults. They easily run circles around kids at this: the kids get tired, get distracted, get confused and give up, get stuck into an obviously sub-optimal pattern but don’t try to fix it, etc. (The kind of adults who have decades of practice at trying / learning new things. Many relevant metacognitive skills have broad applicability across disciplines.)

One big advantage kids have is that their basic needs are met by someone else, and they generally don’t have lots of other worries and responsibilities. This allows them to focus on something they are interested in far longer and deeper than most people who aren’t doing that thing professionally.

The best for learning (for either an adult or a child) is a combination of personal interest + pleasant no-pressure environment + face-to-face guidance from a trusted expert tutor/coach, who can probe weak points, notice and correct mistakes and misconceptions, suggest methods of practice, ....

> pride/hubris

What you call pride/hubris, I call shame and fear of embarrassment. People really don’t want other people (or themselves) to see them as failures.

> when someone in an inferior social positions knows a thing

This kind of social situation is completely different than the “self-directed intrinsically-motivated reward” situation you were talking about before.

It’s hardly surprising that someone who is supposed to be an expert doesn’t want to be shown up by their subordinate or their junior colleague. It makes them look incompetent and is a direct threat to their social position and livelihood.

> What you call pride/hubris, I call shame and fear of embarrassment.

It sounds like you're assuming these conversations/learning events occur in public. Why would people feel shame/embarrassment about something nobody can see them doing?

This was the point of my example: if someone is alone in the wilderness, what does it matter to anyone but them—to anything but their survival—if they were to try and fail at building a shelter or a trap?

> It’s hardly surprising that someone who is supposed to be an expert

Who said anything about being an expert?

The example that comes first to my mind is a grandchild trying to teach their grantparent to post photos to Facebook on their iPad. The grandmother explicitly—even "infamously"—has no experience with computers or anything to do with them. If their friends/family/etc. were to observe the situation, they'd have a preconception that the child would know more about "posting photos to Facebook" than the adult would.

And yet, despite nominally having no real way to be "shown up"–no presumed domain expertise to lose; and despite nominally wanting the grandchild to teach them how to post photos to Facebook; and despite the grandparent being intrinsically motivated to learn how to post photos to Facebook (because they enjoy the social interaction that comes when friends see their photos); the grandparent still won't bother to focus at all on paying attention to / understanding / remembering what the grandchild is saying.

I would describe this as a kind of learned helplessness, except it's more like contextual helplessness. It's not that they can't learn how to do this–they seem to be able to learn it from a peer their own age just fine. But when it comes to those they think of as people they are supposed to be teaching, their mind just turns into a brick wall.

I would compare it to the prevalence of people who get their romantic partner to open jars for them, instead of buying one of those gripper gadgets that allow them to open the jar. If their partner offers to buy them one of those, they'll often actively refuse the gadget! They think of this job as something someone is supposed to do for them — something they shouldn't have to do – rather than something they want to get done by whatever means, as efficiently as possible. Despite it not being a hard/complex job, or a matter of comparative advantage.

Did you mean "neophobes"?