Live to learn

As I was walking in to the university yesterday, a thought struck me. I asked myself the question, why do I work at the university? It certainly isn't because of the money. Firstly, I could earn a heck of a lot more in other industries. Secondly, I don't really need to work any more. I don't have a mortgage on the house now, and my children are grown up and independent (two of them have their own homes now). So why do I stay employed? The answer came clearly, as if from the skies above. I 'work' at the university because I love to learn, and going to the university, spending time with my colleagues and students, doing research and exploring all the many possibilities of my chosen subject of study, is incredibly rewarding. I realised that I don't go to university to 'work', but I'm very fortunate that I do get paid doing something I really love. I live to learn. And my university is the closest place to home I know where I am free to explore all the possibilities of that learning - to push the boundaries, try out new things, take risks and see how far I can go with learning new things.

This is also why (I realised, as I was walking to university) that whenever I launch a new student course, module or programme, I always try to agree a contract with my students. I tell them 'I know you want to learn from me, but I would also like to learn from you.' About that point I usually get some strange looks from some of them, but my students all 'get it' in the end. We make an agreement to learn from each other, because even the greatest minds on the planet don't know everything. The wisest minds on the planet are those who realise they actually know very little, and who seek out to try to discover and explore to fill some of the void. Have you ever stood at the edge of the ocean, or gazed up at the stars on a clear night, and felt so very, very small? That's the kind of awe we should feel when we consider learning.

Learning is lifelong and life-wide, but I didn't always know that. I believed the lie I was fed in school that learning stops when you leave formal education. It took me a while to discover that learning is actually only beginning when we leave school. Most people don't actually discover a passion for learning until they have entered a world of work. Tragically, many never discover a passion for learning at all. In a recent post I quoted Ashley Tan who said 'teachers teach, but educators reach'. For those of us who aspire to be educators, to reach beyond mere teaching, this has to be the line in the sand. Are we simply going to teach, or are we going to reach out to a lost generation of learners?

I know why I continue to work in education. Because I have fallen in love with learning. What about you?

Photo by Terry Robinson


Live to learn by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.