The Importance of Learning
Learning is vitally important because it helps us make informed choices about our own lives and the societies that we live in.
Let's define what learning is.Learning is the acquisition of knowledge or skill through education and experience.Our ability to learn and our intellectual capacity are intangibles.However,these intangibles are your greatest assets because everything you do to reinvent and update your knowledge allows you to grow from where you are today to where you want to go.Learning is a prerequisite to growth.
In brief,recognize that lifelong learning is a journey with no end in sight and that no one can ever have all the answers.We must have the humility or willingness to learn from others.In other words,learn from the experts.We will never live long enough to learn it all on our own.
The ways of learning
Learning can be a great joy,yet that is not what most people experience in our educational system.The skills of learning are something that we very much need in our rapidly changing world,both individually and as a culture,yet most of us are "impoverished" compared to the potential easily within the grasp of our society.What shall we do - for our children,ourselves,and our culture - to establish a healthier and more empowering relationship to learning?
If we were truly successful in empowering children to be the best learners they can be,it would not be long before they would insist on running their own show,on being self-directed learners.Both experience and brain research verify that freedom and self-direction are essential to high quality learning.Without basic structural change,these changes in method would at best be just a sugar coating for the old authoritarianism.At worst,they could become a considerably more sophisticated form of manipulation.
To sum up ,we could be using more effective and more whole- person techniques.