Learning is contagious
14/10/07 22:56 Filed in: Musing
I listen
to Minister of Education Hazel Manning and to Minister of Science
and Technology Abdul Hamid and I don't hear the word learn.
I hear education. I hear student. I hear tertiary.
Somewhere along the line, I think we've managed to lose the point of education in our haste to yoke a whole bunch of young people to the pursuit of bits of paper that are supposed to be key to the Government's plans for the country, due in 2020.
But learning isn't a Bachelor's degree, or even a Master's or a Doctorate. Learning, according to most dictionaries, is how we acquire knowledge of skills. We get these new capabilities by study and experience, but long before we can get to there, the best students learn how to learn.
Many years ago, I had a General Paper teacher named Archie Edwards. Archie was blind, but well to do and always seemed to be teaching as a way of filling eight or so hours a day. He taught history, but the only time I ever was taught by him during school hours was in that GP class.
The class largely sucked, but Archie didn't. I had actually met him before entering sixth form when I joined a small group of people who read books onto tape for him. The pay wasn't much, but Archie was a voracious reader with eclectic tastes in books, so there was always reading to be done.
So I'd drink some gin and apple juice, read a few chapters and swill some more. I think I did a pretty good job of it and even enjoyed some of the books, including Frank Herbert's Dune, though Archie did ask if I could minimise the clinking of the glasses.
Along the way, chatting with Archie in the evening, borrowing his original copy of The Concert for Bangladesh, and trying to see the world through his sage and only physically unseeing eyes, I learned the most important thing a school can share with its students, I learned how to learn.
People have different reasons for learning, some embrace it to escape difficult personal circumstances, some romance it as if it were a lover who keeps on offering new and intriguing twists in an affair. Some, unfortunately, slog through the experience as a necessary evil on the way to building a career.
Once upon a time, that was something that you could do. You could get some paper, amass some letters behind your name and be set for life. That isn't so anymore. Like a patient who views decades old medical journals in a doctor's office with justifiable concern, people today instinctively drift toward professionals, businesses and service providers who keep current with changing technology and the new techniques and procedures in their chosen field.
Since meeting Archie, I've read millions of pages on a wide range of subjects, engaged three professions with varying degrees of success and had the most remarkable time. To this day, I read more than sixty pages a day just to keep up with my current professional interests, some of them printed, some of them on the web. I got bit when I was little and I never got over it.
I don't feel very special, but I do feel sad for young people who have never been introduced to the miracle of discovery, of growing understanding and the giddy feeling you get when you realise just how much you will never know, no matter how hard you try.
It's humbling, exciting and a little bit terrifying, somehow, calling it learning is like calling diving out of a plane with a surfboard and a parachute a sport.
So I tell my nephews and nieces, the children of my friends...read.
Read horror novels, romances, the daily paper, comics, even the horoscope. Read one thing and get a little buzz and you'll try something else. Before you know it, there will be books at your bedside, magazines on the toilet tank and short stories on your PDA or SmartPhone.
Knowledge is crack and I hope you get hooked.
I hear education. I hear student. I hear tertiary.
Somewhere along the line, I think we've managed to lose the point of education in our haste to yoke a whole bunch of young people to the pursuit of bits of paper that are supposed to be key to the Government's plans for the country, due in 2020.
But learning isn't a Bachelor's degree, or even a Master's or a Doctorate. Learning, according to most dictionaries, is how we acquire knowledge of skills. We get these new capabilities by study and experience, but long before we can get to there, the best students learn how to learn.
Many years ago, I had a General Paper teacher named Archie Edwards. Archie was blind, but well to do and always seemed to be teaching as a way of filling eight or so hours a day. He taught history, but the only time I ever was taught by him during school hours was in that GP class.
The class largely sucked, but Archie didn't. I had actually met him before entering sixth form when I joined a small group of people who read books onto tape for him. The pay wasn't much, but Archie was a voracious reader with eclectic tastes in books, so there was always reading to be done.
So I'd drink some gin and apple juice, read a few chapters and swill some more. I think I did a pretty good job of it and even enjoyed some of the books, including Frank Herbert's Dune, though Archie did ask if I could minimise the clinking of the glasses.
Along the way, chatting with Archie in the evening, borrowing his original copy of The Concert for Bangladesh, and trying to see the world through his sage and only physically unseeing eyes, I learned the most important thing a school can share with its students, I learned how to learn.
People have different reasons for learning, some embrace it to escape difficult personal circumstances, some romance it as if it were a lover who keeps on offering new and intriguing twists in an affair. Some, unfortunately, slog through the experience as a necessary evil on the way to building a career.
Once upon a time, that was something that you could do. You could get some paper, amass some letters behind your name and be set for life. That isn't so anymore. Like a patient who views decades old medical journals in a doctor's office with justifiable concern, people today instinctively drift toward professionals, businesses and service providers who keep current with changing technology and the new techniques and procedures in their chosen field.
Since meeting Archie, I've read millions of pages on a wide range of subjects, engaged three professions with varying degrees of success and had the most remarkable time. To this day, I read more than sixty pages a day just to keep up with my current professional interests, some of them printed, some of them on the web. I got bit when I was little and I never got over it.
I don't feel very special, but I do feel sad for young people who have never been introduced to the miracle of discovery, of growing understanding and the giddy feeling you get when you realise just how much you will never know, no matter how hard you try.
It's humbling, exciting and a little bit terrifying, somehow, calling it learning is like calling diving out of a plane with a surfboard and a parachute a sport.
So I tell my nephews and nieces, the children of my friends...read.
Read horror novels, romances, the daily paper, comics, even the horoscope. Read one thing and get a little buzz and you'll try something else. Before you know it, there will be books at your bedside, magazines on the toilet tank and short stories on your PDA or SmartPhone.
Knowledge is crack and I hope you get hooked.
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