Most of my suggestions and ideas would have to be whole mods in and of themselves, so I don't know that it would be reasonable to expect you to do anything with it. My thoughts atm on learning and how it should be leads me to a three-way split:

Active working
Active study
Social learning.

Active work really needs no explanation.

Active study is mostly via recreation or books at present. I would love a proper "learn through media" addendum if you or someone could manage it. Pawns use the TV to learn about a specific subject rather than general recreation. cooking shows, ect. Pawns would do this automatically, selecting one based on their passions, or perhaps the player could set a mandatory channel through the TV UI or some kind of setting on the pawn? idk.

Defiantly a bit of a modding void on adult learning, unless I missed it or something. Could see a college, lectures and seminars mod but that doesn't have to be your job. I'm just throwing it out there.

Social learning would be asking, in a social setting, for advice, or learning from stories and tips offered by others. Both pawns would get a small boost of xp based on the best skill of the other pawn, but capped by the social skill level of the same. It could happen any time, and wouldn't be scheduled. This would allow for one expert with good social to provide a reasonable amount of passive instruction to other pawns over time, making them even more valuable to the colony.

XP boost: [5* speaker's highest skill level, 5* speaker's social skill level, health: speech % as a flat value] keep lowest, ignore if negative. Given for the speaker's best skill or random from their best if tied. Bear in mind This is probably not well balanced and would need to be tweaked.

Ideally, all three would have separate daily caps, or perhaps some would ignore caps (like social.) so that you can get more skill if you're doing all three daily.

Just my thoughts, sorry that it has little to do with the content of your mod. I mostly bring this up because I would probably want those kinds of features as a companion to a mod like this one so that it's a bit more of a lateral shift rather than a straight nerf. It would add a learning curve for the player so that the nerf could be made up for if they used the mechanics properly.

active work needs no explanation? :D i have no idea what you mean tbh.

you should check out "vanilla books expanded" and "pawn education" for what you call active learning, "razzle dazzle" for theater stuff to have pawns learn social in a more fun way, "prisoner arena" for uh lets call it sparring..also get "tv is educational". all of it has been done :P

Would it be possible to limit the amount of passions a pawn can generate with? I feel like they are often too generous and i often end up with a colony full of ace-of-all-trades. Limiting major and burning passions (and perhaps VESkills' ones as well) to only one or maybe two per pawn would furthermore incentivize to focus a pawn's job to a handful of skills.