If the master could in his old age say, “I am still learning,” I don’t know why I am so surprised to be still learning and having so much fun doing so.
Why just today I learned that I have a Golden Tortoise beetle in my garden and that they eat morning glory leaves; that it is normal for bees not to use the frames, that is the structure that holds the comb, nearest the outside of beehive; how and when to prune a rhododendron; how to properly cultivate a garden; that Facebook, Pintrest, and Google are the black holes of time. From where did this idea come that learning is hard, isn’t fun, and stops when you graduate, become an adult or get older?
I know where I got the idea that learning is hard. I have a learning disability. I started elementary school in 1962 and there were some things that I just couldn’t do. Lots of kids mix up their b’s and d’s, and their p’s and q’s; they do look quite the same, but 5’s and r’s? I couldn’t get past the two-times tables when it came time to learn multiplication.
When we started handwriting, I didn’t know whether I was right handed or left-handed, I used both, but was actively discouraged from learning to write with both.
Not much was known at that time about how to work with a learning disability. I developed my own “work arounds” and went on to graduate college, although I still can’t multiply. But learning in school was hard, and I came to believe that if I could learn something easily, it wasn’t valuable.
When you are passionate about something learning becomes an all consuming joy. One of my heroes is Temple Grandin. Grandin is highly autistic and did go to school for her education. According to her biography, she obtained her B.A. at Franklin Pierce College and her M.S. in Animal Science at Arizona State University. Grandin received her Ph.D. in animal science from the University of Illinois in 1989. Today she teaches courses on livestock behavior and facility design at Colorado State University and consults with the livestock industry on facility design, livestock handling, and animal welfare.
But a lot of the information she used for her life work was gleaned on her own because she was passionate about horses and other animals and wanted their lives and the end of their lives to be better. Then she went one better. From her unique perspective she saw that there were vast similarities between how an animal perceives the world and how an autistic person perceives the world and she has become a leader in the treatment of autism.
I believe that the idea that being self-taught was not as good as an academic education comes from society itself. Schools give diplomas and have graduation ceremonies to publicly acknowledge that a student now knows a topic. Where is the public acknowledgement and praise for someone who is so consumed by a topic that they search out every last piece of information on it? These people exist, Walt Disney, J.D. Rockefeller, Rachael Ray and Abe Lincoln are examples. But when their successes are spoken of, they are praised for becoming successful in spite of not having an education, not as having become successful from being self-taught.
I think I may have picked up the idea that learning stopped when you graduated school from the school system itself. If something really interesting was happening on a school day, well, you missed it because you had to attend school. That gave the impression that learning took place only in the school building, and only during the school day. If you were really crazy about a topic but it didn’t fit into the curriculum, you were told to play with that on your own time and don’t interrupt the day’s lesson to ask questions. That attitude gave the impression that only the topics in the curriculum were worth learning.
I was blessed to have children who were not ready to be gone from the home to school all day when they were old enough to start school. I had been teaching them the things kids learn in preschool, and we just segued into home-schooling.
Here was a chance to explore student-driven learning. We all soaked it up. The whole world became our classroom and interests were pursued with vigor. Not only were the children learning information, but they were learning it in the context of everyday life. Some of the learning had immediate application; some was for the pure joy of learning. Instead of just learning data, the children were learning how to learn and how learning could be a joy. I was truly enjoying the ‘do-over’ of getting to do school with my kids. All the topics that were not important enough to study while I was in school were there to be explored. It was fun. It was easy. It was worth it.
I am still learning.