January 1
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Today's
quotation:
There
is no end to education. It is not that you read a
book, pass an examination, and finish with
education. The whole of life, from the moment you
are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
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Today's
Meditation:
My
sincere hope is that I never stop learning until the day I
die. There are so many fascinating things about this
planet and the people and animals and plants that live on
it, that I want to know as much as I can--while keeping in
mind that I can't know it all, in order to avoid
frustration. We tend to see education as a concept
that is limited to a "school" or an online
workshop or conferences, something that is formalized and
that has an assigned teacher or facilitator who's in
charge of passing along information so that we can use it
to build our "knowledge."
But education is so much more than that. As a
teacher, I have an intimate relationship with education in
general, and I know that my main job as a teacher is to
help people to learn material--I can't really
"teach" them much of anything. A professor
of mine from long ago once said, "I can't teach you
anything. I can only tell you what I know, and it's
up to you whether you learn it or not." As a
young college student, I saw that as a cop-out. As
an older and more experienced teacher myself, I see the
wisdom and the truth in the statement.
Life is a process of learning. Our children help us
to learn how to be parents. Our siblings and parents
help us to learn to be patient and loyal and
constructively critical. The people we meet teach us
how to be discerning and how to recognize cues that tell
us how the other person is feeling, even sometimes what
they're thinking.
A walk in the woods--while paying close attention to our
surroundings--helps us to learn about the cycles of life,
resiliency, and relationships between organisms. A
walk with a dog or a young child helps us to learn just
how many fascinating things exist if we but see them with
different eyes.
I learn more from my young students now than I did twenty
years ago. They've been brought up differently than
I was, and they have completely different sets of
experiences to share. If I respect that, pay
attention to it, and allow myself to learn from it, then I
will continue to expand my education for as long as I
live.
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Questions to
consider:
What kinds of things do you feel that you no longer
learn from? Why not?
What do you consider education to be? How did you
develop that perspective? Is it accurate?
From where have your most important lessons in life come
from? From classrooms, or experiences? Have
you sought more input from the same source(s)?
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For further
thought:
Education
is more than schooling. It is a cast of mind, a willingness to
see the world with an endless sense of curiosity and wonder.
If you would be truly educated, you must adopt this cast
of mind. You must open yourself to the richness of your everyday
experience--to your own emotions, to the movements of the heavens and
the languages of birds, to the privations
and successes of people in
other lands and other times, to the artistry in the hands of the
mechanic and the typist and the child. There is no limit to the
learning that appears before us. It is enough to fill us each
day a thousand times over.
Kent
Nerburn
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