JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

Ronni Bennett in her rich blog Time Goes By: what it’s really like to get older shared a story in Learning Forever / Forever Learning

On the afternoon of the third and final day of meetings, I was with the CEO in his office and in searching for some notes in my bag, I pulled out the book I’d taken with me for hotel and airplane reading: a life of King David by Jonathan Kirsch.

The CEO riffled through the book, asked some questions and we talked about it for five minutes or so. Then he said, in a surprised tone of voice, “You’ve never stopped learning, have you?”

I was surprised that he was surprised and he, a European by birth and upbringing, said that it was his experience, in the United States, that few people showed much intellectual curiosity past college or beyond what is necessary for their work. I refrained from suggesting he find a new set of friends, but he was not entirely wrong.

Go read more of her blogpost and her blog.

Ronni Bennett continued later in her post:

Too much of the public discourse on aging is dependent on two generally-held beliefs: that learning stops when formal education ends (which is applied to everyone) and older workers can’t and don’t learn new skills.

One of the reasons why Ted and I are homeschooling our children is to teach them that life is learning. Education doesn’t start at 9 am one morning in a child’s sixth September and end after the nineteenth (or twenty-third or twenty-seventh) June. Diplomas should mark the commencement, not the end of our education. We learn as we live. Ted and I hope to cultivate curiousity in our children. We don’t want them to think that they have to be in a classroom to have a teacher. They can teach themselves. We hope they have hunger. We hope they will discover and explore, wonder and share every day they are alive.

Education is at the essence of who we are as humans. We will always have more to know and discover, depths to dive and heights to soar if not in body then in soul. Eternity, I believe, will be eternal learning.

May we nuture intellectual vitality growing up inside our children as they grow. May our daughters be scientists and philosophers, readers and writers, mathematicians and artists all their days. May they never stop learning.

Related links of note this week: