#LearningIs lifelong

As I remarked in my previous #LearningIs post, learning never stops. It is lifelong. Much of the time we don't even realise we are learning, but we are constantly being exposed to new information, and if we pay attention, we are likely to internalise that information in some way.

If you had told me during my school years that learning didn't stop when I left school, I would have been horrified. I didn't enjoy school for most of the time. I found it tedious, many of the teachers didn't seem to be interested in helping me to learn, homework was an invasion of my personal time, and I didn't come away with much for all my efforts. Any notion of additional learning after my schools years would have been anathema to me. I had confused learning with schooling.

I didn't know it at the time, but school was just the start of a learning journey for me, as it is for many millions of others. I fact, I only really started learning seriously when I began to direct my own studies later in life. This was when I became motivated to study because I was interested in learning more about my chosen topic - psychology. I did this all off my own bat, studying part time while holding down a full time day job and a part time evening post teaching at a local college.

The idea of lifelong learning only dawned on me during my time training to be a teacher. It also hadn't occurred to me that most of my later education came from informal learning - because I was interested, I went the extra mile and studied more widely than my job, or my degree required. It was here that the world opened up for me and I began to see the wider picture of life around me.

It's the same for anyone. The main ingredient is interest - self motivation - inspiration to learn something new. It's what students desperately need if they are to succeed as lifelong learners. It's also an ingredient that is sadly missing from many formal learning programmes, whether in schools, colleges of universities. It has never been easier to become a lifelong learner. The personal, connected technologies we now have at our disposal are an increasingly important component of informal learning. It will take a little longer to integrate such tools into formal learning spaces, and some believe this will never happen on a grand scale.

Regardless of whether we use technology however, we will all continue to learn, and some of us will also be fortunate enough to discover how to unlearn and relearn - ultimate skills for the 21st Century. Yes, learning is lifelong, because life needs learning. And when we discover how to self regulate our learning, then are we truly independent.

Photo by Geralt on Pixabay


#LearningIs lifelong by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.