Passive Learning is unchallenging and boring. Active Learning has style and each person's Active Learning Style is unique.
Competency is our ever present goal. A commonly repeated guideline when things get tough and learning gets hard is, "Keep it simple". The way to keep things simple, however, may not always be that simple to find. What is simple for one person may not be simple for another. What seems simple at a distance may not seem simple close up. Or the first step may be simple but suddenly the path may not be so simple, once you get halfway down the road.
It is more natural for some people to work from complex to simple and for other people it is more natural to work from simple to complex. In the world today there is a notion that all complexity can, in fact, be reduced to digital simplicity. Can the universe itself be entirely represented digitally and digitally reproduced to the last bit? Or is there a complexity in the nature of certain relationships that is ever new and living and that can never be completely known, only learned? Is there a simplicity that in the end is not found in reductionism but in creativity?
