I was thinking about it, and I think that one of the most important, essential and fundamental skills that every person should have is to know how to learn. It's unbelievable, but I think most people don't know how to learn by themselves, and it's alarming, I blame this on the education system, which takes children from a very early age and teaches them only to trust authority and repeat what they have been told, teaches them only to obey, not to think, and in no way teaches them to learn, as many people falsely believe. If you put on an exam something different from what you were taught, even if you are right, you will fail, your dissent will not be tolerated, they are not interested in starting a discussion about what is true, they are interested that you repeat what they have told you as a good student that you are, and accept what is dictated from above. In this consists all their teaching, and this is the only thing you are going to learn, you are going to learn that they have the truth, and you don't, and if you want to advance, you will have to accept it, and if you refuse, you will not succeed, you have to remember that the great geniuses and revolutionary minds are generally disowned by this same system. Your mind is their receptacle, and they will take care of filling it. And it is impossible for a person to learn to learn in this way because the student himself is simply a passive subject during all his years of education.
You need to be an agent, you need to be active and always eager to know the truth. You need to have the will to learn by yourself, because many people have become accustomed to someone else thinking for them, and chewing the knowledge to be able to digest it, that makes us dependent, makes us need an intermediary to know the truth, and that really puts us in a very bad position when facing the world. And we can see the effects of this on people very often, I mean, how many people are not paying relatively high amounts of money to learn about blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies when there is abundant and freely accessible information about it all over the Internet to learn for oneself. This is just one example. For most people it is simply easier to have someone else teach them what they need to learn rather than learning on their own, because they have become accustomed to that. It's easier that someone else do the work for us, learn everything they need to learn and draw their own conclusions, and then we learn that. I think it's becoming very difficult to have to think for ourselves.
We have to learn to be self-taught, and I don't say that there is something wrong with having teachers, sometimes it can be very helpful —as long as they are good teachers—, but we cannot depend on them, we need to become independent and begin to demolish all the obstacles that we have put between us and knowledge, to do away with the image that we need someone to tell us what is true and what is not, someone to think for us, we must begin to build a bridge to the truth. And that will only happen when we learn to learn, because then we will know that, not always, but most of the time, the only thing that separates us from the truth is the will to know it.
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Absolutely agree.
My son has been learning Japanese voluntarily for about a year. Now he is registered for the upper class at his school. There, it cannot officially be chosen as a foreign language, so we asked the head of department if we could find a teacher/tutor who would check his learning level and include his preferred foreign language in the curriculum instead of Spanish or French. Of course, we received the answer that this is not possible.
However, I told my son that one should never give up immediately and always formulate one's own interest and argue if possible. It always happens that people can be convinced with good arguments. I am someone who is in favour of exceptions and special cases, because it is always these that initiate minor and major changes. If everyone always did everything the way it has been, .... well, you know the rest of the sentence.
In principle, most of my own life has been like that, working out exceptions, moving into areas for which I have not been officially trained, through self-study and the motivation to learn something on my own. In fact, we weren't taught this at school and I can't even say where I always got this cheek to see extra buns baked for me. I just tried and often it worked out.
But in fact, I also think, I probably never realised my full potential at all and needed many many years not to think I was stupid.
In contrast to my own school life, where at least the teachers did not constantly report to the parents of us pupils because of any academic weaknesses or even "social failures", I noticed with some surprise that at my son's school a so-called "planner" had to be kept from the beginning and this had to be countersigned weekly by the parents. In my view, this is a completely unnecessary and weak measure that shows how much control over learning and behaviour has come over the schools. I think there was a time in the 70s when this was different. But of course it always depends on individual cases and schools and teachers.
I banned it at some point that I will even respond to teacher's remarks in red letters (!) by seeking confrontation with the teacher. After that, there were never again such encroaching entries from him.
Something that has always bothered me somewhat is how some institutions have a monopoly on "knowledge" in what is known as degrees. Basically you may know something but "officially" it is as if you don't know it because you don't have the degree, and therefore, you are not recognized as such. It is a nonsense product of centralization. Perhaps, the least they should do is to give free exams to people who learned something in a self-taught way and who want to be able to use that knowledge in their working life, for example. All that matters is that one know it, right? But apparently not. There is also a lot of prestige and appearances involved, but that is another matter.
In my opinion the current education system in most (maybe all) countries is not about knowledge at all, it is probably a business. Many of the people who end up going to universities do so simply to get a job and not to learn this or that, and the result is often incompetent professionals who often don't know what they are talking about but speak with authority because they have a degree to back them up.
You're right, that's how change is made, I hope they finally end up recognizing his knowledge.
I would be honored if you'd consider taking a look at this,
https://discord.gg/cR6jVagG
I will check it out. I don't have a discord account though. Maybe I will create one.
Cheers.