Education isn’t something you can finish
You never stop learning. Even if you want to stabilize and control your life, at one point there will be a lesson for life to teach you.
The title of this post is a quote by Isaac Asimov (1920–1992), a professor of biochemistry and prolific writer who wrote and edited more than 500 books. Here’s a small bit of text on Asimov from Wikipedia:
In a 1988 interview by Bill Moyers, Asimov proposed computer-aided learning, where people would use computers to find information on subjects in which they were interested. He thought this would make learning more interesting, since people would have the freedom to choose what to learn, and would help spread knowledge around the world. Also, the one-to-one model would let students learn at their own pace. Asimov thought that people would live in space by the year 2019.
We might not be living in space (yet!) but I would dare say that the rest of his prediction is 100% accurate.
In an age in which jobs are being repurposed, relocated, or just extinguished, people and their careers are constantly changing. The question is not if people need to learn new things but rather how and why.
Seeking Wisdom
Some people are just more curious about actively learning than others, and that attitude of humility towards knowledge can make a big difference. If you allow your ego to tell you that you already know a lot about life and what surrounds you (or even worse, everything), then life will hit you in the face soon enough. Too often do we know people that have become comfortably numb.
Change might be hard to wrap your head around, of course! The friction of moving from stability to uncertainty can be daunting. But regardless of where you get your lessons from, “Last chapter” will never be your last chapter. Life has a way of throwing challenges at you and most of the times the rug will simply be swept under your feet.
“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”
― Albert Einstein
One should not attempt to know everything but to gain enough wisdom to keep learning and sharing so that the purpose of our life goes beyond our mere existence.
Promises of Knowledge
I’ve always felt like someone who likes to hack things and processes. After a certain age, I was a challenging kid to teach and the older I grew the more skeptical I’ve become. I remember how my mother used to warn me that that would happen.
Learning how to perform a job requires training and a common ground of knowledge, sure. But now, after 13 years of working in the education field, I can tell you for sure that nothing will prepare you for how you should work for a particular company in a particular industry, with a particular product/service. Nor there is any manual on how to work in the context of your colleagues, with specific ways of working, dealing with bureaucracy, and many other lenses on the topic.
When you start a job, you might have enough experience in your life to draw decisions from it, but ultimately you’re still going to have to learn a lot. And that is a hard lesson I try to teach every single one of my students: stay humble, keep learning.
As the old proverb says, it’s more important to teach the man how to fish than to give him the fish. It’s important to seek wisdom rather than accumulate knowledge, for wisdom is always evolving beyond your own biases and shortcomings.
