It's not even about them failing to learn, necessarily - it's them failing to internalize deeply enough to recall how to solve their problems the next time they crop up. They're being handed answers from up high instead of experimenting - no practice, no wonder they can't solve it the next time either.
Even techies can run into this problem - the only reason we might do better, on average, is that we experiment with more things, and perhaps pursue more of this knowledge for it's own sake. We got sick of being on hold for tech support, we encountered issues tech support couldn't help us with, so we spent more time experimenting and internalizing the solutions to our problems.
To some degree this suggests an answer: Give people some time to try and solve their own problems. "I can take a look when I'm over there next" instead of spending a lot of time trying to remotely troubleshoot the problem over the phone. "Sure - let me just finish this up and I'll swing by" instead of dropping everything to troubleshoot a problem in-person for a coworker.
I still help my mom out some with various tech problems, but I think we've both benifited from letting her (re)develop some independence and self-sufficiency when it comes to technology.
Lack of experimentation might also be because they are afraid to break something. I remember my (completely non digital) parents being unusually good with their car navigation system. Turns out the sales rep had told them: "its impossible to break this system, just try and it will be ok", and so they had trial and errorred their way to understanding how it worked.
100%. All too often with our software it is too easy to break stuff in an unfixable (to a newbie) way.
Just an anecdote: I organised an Android phone for my gf's mother. After a lot of training, she was using it to send and receive photos to her family and loving having it.
If she took a photo and wasn't happy with it, she would want to delete it. In the Samsung gallery app (Galaxy S4), you long-press on the thumbnail of the photo, then choose delete.
Problem is, the thumbnail of the Album itself is actually the last photo that you've taken. So she has inadvertently deleted the whole album (all her photos) by accident twice now!
I can't blame her because the icon she is deleting looks exactly the same as the picture she's trying to delete, only the message is a tiny bit different ("would you like to delete this album?" versus the usual "would you like to delete this photo?"), easy to not read the last word of the message if you've seen it 1000x before and done it safely.
I blame Samsung 100% for these accidential deletions. These phones and software just aren't designed with the non-confident user in mind, and in my opinion that's a broken UI.
Deleting an album containing hundreds of photos is something so dangerous and something you'd probably want to do so rarely that such an operation should at least warrant an extra message saying, "you are about to delete an album containing $number photos, are you sure?" And why not have a recycle bin? There are many ways this could have been easily avoided.
I can totally understand why a user like that would be nervous about pressing buttons they're not sure about. Especially after accidentally deleting all their photos!
Also there's no way to use a better Gallery app, the camera app always uses the IMO broken Samsung Galley app to review photos, and there's no way to change that.
Unfortunately I can't tell her "it's impossible to break this system" with that phone. I wish I could.
Sometimes I think that I'm just lucky I didn't have an experience like that when I was first starting with computers, because I might have been so scared after that that I wouldn't have continued to explore and learn. Nowadays I basically think that there's no problem with computers that you can't fix given the time and motivation.
Even techies can run into this problem - the only reason we might do better, on average, is that we experiment with more things, and perhaps pursue more of this knowledge for it's own sake. We got sick of being on hold for tech support, we encountered issues tech support couldn't help us with, so we spent more time experimenting and internalizing the solutions to our problems.
To some degree this suggests an answer: Give people some time to try and solve their own problems. "I can take a look when I'm over there next" instead of spending a lot of time trying to remotely troubleshoot the problem over the phone. "Sure - let me just finish this up and I'll swing by" instead of dropping everything to troubleshoot a problem in-person for a coworker.
I still help my mom out some with various tech problems, but I think we've both benifited from letting her (re)develop some independence and self-sufficiency when it comes to technology.