Here's s brief excerpt from Dilip Mukerjea's new book, CREATING A LEARNING PLANET: Emancipating Education, Reinvigorating Teacher Learning, Championing Children:

THE RATIONALE FOR ‘LEARNING’, ‘CREATIVITY’, AND ‘INNOVATION’ IN EDUCATION 

The word “create” is derived from the Greek “kranein,” meaning ‘to accomplish’, and the Sanskrit ‘kar’ ~ ‘to make.’ From the Latin, we have “creare” ~ ‘to make out of nothing.’ 

To create means to originate, to bring into being from what was not there before, to cause to exist.

Creativity may be viewed as the ability to originate with artistic or intellectual inventiveness. The successful creators within a marketspace of competitive intelligences know how to think big, start small, move fast! 

The creative individual is adept at seeing an abstraction in the concrete and the concrete in an abstraction, with the ability to relate one to the other. 

The word “learning” derives from the Indo-European ‘leis,’ a noun meaning ‘track’ or ‘furrow.’ To learn means to enhance capacity and capability through experience gained by following a track or discipline. Learning often leads to profound change, and massive transformation. These are self-reinforcing processes. 

NOTE: The Maori language uses the same word for ‘teaching’ and ‘learning.’ 

The word ‘learn’ also comes from the Old English leornian “to get knowledge, be cultivated, study, read, think about.” The transitive sense (He learned me how to read), now vulgar, was acceptable from c.1200 until the early 19th century, from Old English læran “to teach.” 

In the context of Psychology, ‘to learn’ connotes the modification of behaviour through practice, training, or experience. 

In the most fundamental sense, ‘learning’ connotes the act of bridging the gap between what one knows to what one doesn’t know. This is not merely the act of rote memorisation, but of understanding, and, more deeply, apprehending, the learning material, in order to be comprehending it. 

Thus, learning is not complete unless and until the object of learning (the material or subject that is to be learned) has been absorbed and embodied, so that it effects a transformation in behaviour. 

At its core, learning is a process that results in a change in knowledge or behaviour as a result of experience. Understanding what it takes to get that knowledge in and out (or promote behavioral change of a specific kind) can help optimise learning. 

In each learning experience, we need to 

• link, connect, and associate our focus 

• with what needs to be learned, • so as to absorb and embody the experience, 

• then reinforce it into mind and body memory, 

• and, via repeated usage, come to know what we had set out to learn. 

Creativity and Learning imbue our lives with meaning. Never fear that your life will end; instead, be afraid that it will never begin! 

The word “idea” comes from: late 14c., “archetype of a thing in the mind of God; Platonic `idea,’ from Latin “idea,” and in Platonic philosophy “archetype,” from Greek idea “ideal prototype,” literally “the look of a thing (as opposed to the reality); form; kind, sort, nature,” from idein “to see,” from PIE [Proto-Indo European (linguistics)]*wid-es-ya-, suffixed form of root *weid- “to see”. Sense of “result of thinking” first recorded 1640s. 

Source: Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper