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<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=1 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR><TD><SPAN class=TopStory>'The pursuit of learning is to increase day after day'</SPAN>
<SPAN class=Subheadline></SPAN></TD></TR><TR><TD>Keeble McFarlane
Saturday, March 03, 2007
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</TD></TR><TR><TD><SPAN class=Description>Keeble McFarlane</SPAN></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><P class=StoryText align=justify>Many people believe that learning stops when they leave school, and they ought to merely coast for the rest of their lives on the knowledge they acquired formally in those formative years. What they either don't understand, or more likely choose not to understand, is that not a day goes by when they don't learn something. But because it isn't presented by professional teachers in a classroom, it isn't learning. (There are people who feel that a day without learning something new is a wasted day!) For a great many of us though, there is no choice but to learn for ourselves, for going to school is not within the realm of possibility. In such cases, our parents couldn't afford to educate us past secondary school, and in many parts of the world today, getting past elementary school is all but impossible - either because such institutions are few and far between, or the parents can't afford to send the children, or both.<P class=StoryText align=justify>In this modern age, societies generally understand that education is not merely something nice and desirable, is not a frill, but is an absolute necessity like proper health care and nutrition, safe, wholesome water to drink, proper policing for safety and security, and decent physical infrastructure. While all recognise that imperative and give lip service to education, the actual efforts to achieve it vary all over the place. For the rich countries, it is relatively easy to provide publicly financed education from early childhood to young adulthood. They even provide continuing education in the form of specialist technical training and instruction tailored for certain industries and trades, as well as in-house training put on by individual enterprises for their workforces. When you join the military you spend a great deal of your time learning and practising new techniques, strategies and methods of carrying out your tasks.<P class=StoryText align=justify>You will often hear people comment, "Well, at least, that was a learning experience", when ruefully describing the less-than-stellar results of their latest project. You get the feeling that the project was a totally wasted effort, and the person is, as they say "chalking it up to experience". Well, that's valuable, too. I recall many years ago, when my boss assigned a new recruit to my care for a while. He watched and helped edit voice reports for the night newscast, rewrote scripts, and so on. One evening he begged me to do the second edition after the first had gone to air successfully. He strung the tapes together but didn't record which ones or the order in which they ran. When we went on the air the whole thing was a shambles, as none of us had any idea what was coming next. He was in a total panic when he realised what he'd done, and thought the boss would kill him the next day. I assured him that I would take the heat, and extracted one promise from him - not to waste that mistake, but to learn everything he could from it.<P class=StoryText align=justify>But there is another aspect of learning - it has less to do with increasing our potential for earning and more to do with the sheer joy of learning about the world around us and the personal enrichment it brings.<P class=StoryText align=justify>Reading about the Chinese sage, Lao Tzu, who walked the earth 2600 years ago and gave us our headline, studying the life cycle of a mosqu
<SPAN class=Subheadline></SPAN></TD></TR><TR><TD>Keeble McFarlane
Saturday, March 03, 2007
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=5 width=80 align=left border=0><TBODY><TR><TD>
</TD></TR><TR><TD><SPAN class=Description>Keeble McFarlane</SPAN></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><P class=StoryText align=justify>Many people believe that learning stops when they leave school, and they ought to merely coast for the rest of their lives on the knowledge they acquired formally in those formative years. What they either don't understand, or more likely choose not to understand, is that not a day goes by when they don't learn something. But because it isn't presented by professional teachers in a classroom, it isn't learning. (There are people who feel that a day without learning something new is a wasted day!) For a great many of us though, there is no choice but to learn for ourselves, for going to school is not within the realm of possibility. In such cases, our parents couldn't afford to educate us past secondary school, and in many parts of the world today, getting past elementary school is all but impossible - either because such institutions are few and far between, or the parents can't afford to send the children, or both.<P class=StoryText align=justify>In this modern age, societies generally understand that education is not merely something nice and desirable, is not a frill, but is an absolute necessity like proper health care and nutrition, safe, wholesome water to drink, proper policing for safety and security, and decent physical infrastructure. While all recognise that imperative and give lip service to education, the actual efforts to achieve it vary all over the place. For the rich countries, it is relatively easy to provide publicly financed education from early childhood to young adulthood. They even provide continuing education in the form of specialist technical training and instruction tailored for certain industries and trades, as well as in-house training put on by individual enterprises for their workforces. When you join the military you spend a great deal of your time learning and practising new techniques, strategies and methods of carrying out your tasks.<P class=StoryText align=justify>You will often hear people comment, "Well, at least, that was a learning experience", when ruefully describing the less-than-stellar results of their latest project. You get the feeling that the project was a totally wasted effort, and the person is, as they say "chalking it up to experience". Well, that's valuable, too. I recall many years ago, when my boss assigned a new recruit to my care for a while. He watched and helped edit voice reports for the night newscast, rewrote scripts, and so on. One evening he begged me to do the second edition after the first had gone to air successfully. He strung the tapes together but didn't record which ones or the order in which they ran. When we went on the air the whole thing was a shambles, as none of us had any idea what was coming next. He was in a total panic when he realised what he'd done, and thought the boss would kill him the next day. I assured him that I would take the heat, and extracted one promise from him - not to waste that mistake, but to learn everything he could from it.<P class=StoryText align=justify>But there is another aspect of learning - it has less to do with increasing our potential for earning and more to do with the sheer joy of learning about the world around us and the personal enrichment it brings.<P class=StoryText align=justify>Reading about the Chinese sage, Lao Tzu, who walked the earth 2600 years ago and gave us our headline, studying the life cycle of a mosqu