Learning

LEARNING

From the day we are born we learn.  And we have to learn.  If we don’t learn we would not survive.  Survival is one of our strongest desires, so we quickly learn as we grow up,

Many people suggest they don’t want to learn.  They would never read a book, what is it going to teach them?  They never enjoyed going to school, it was a waste of time.  It never crosses their mind that you can learn how to improve your life, especially from books.  And the things one learns at school assists you through life so you can learn more and communicate with others.

As a child I was taught ballet dancing.  I wasn’t the most brilliant in the class, just average, but I was born pigeon toed.  My Aunt encouraged my Mum to enrol me at a dance school. Once I learned and practiced all the exercises, my feet started to turn straight.  Many professional ballet dancers walk with their toes pointing outwards.  Because of my pigeon toes the muscles in my legs grew stronger and I walked with straight feet.  Ballet was teaching my body how to change tor the better.

But what about school?  Is it really necessary?  Well considering that education, as it is today, wasn’t available to everyone two hundred years ago, and people managed to survive without reading, one could say it is a waste of time.  But books weren’t so easily available then, and people told everyone what they had heard from someone else.  We all know where that can lead.  Stories get enlarged in the retelling, so are not always believable.  Information in a book or a newspaper is more likely to be correct than information passed on by word of mouth.

Since it has become an expectation that every child must go to school and be educated, each generation gains more knowledge than their parents. You might be wondering why?  It is simple really. Each child learns, or should learn from their parents what their parents know.  When the child goes to school, they learn things their parents don’t know.  For instance.  My father found it very difficult to understand how the universe worked and how the earth went round the sun.  Now my Dad was born in 1899.  He went to school until he was 12, but not much was known about the planets and our solar system in the early 1900s.  I was taught all about that at school in the 1940/50s, so I understood it perfectly. When my Dad was a lot older and I was married, my husband and I explained to him with oranges and tennis balls, how the earth spun on its own axis and rotated around the sun. This shows how a child will end their life knowing more than their parents at the same age. 

What this also means is, if we do not improve our knowledge, we cannot help our children to be up to date with that knowledge before they go to school, meaning that child doesn’t have a strong base on which to add more information. 

Of course, all the learning does not have to be academic.  Knowing how to make things and work with one’s hands, is also learning.  But theory of why things work that way, and the understanding behind how things are made comes in books, so reading is still important. 

Some children have difficulty with reading, but patience while teaching them will finally result in success.  It is the understanding of what they are reading that is important.  Knowing what the words mean and the number of words they can understand improves their learning and gives them more opportunities. 

Learning is the foundation of success.  The more we know the more we will understand.  The more we understand the greater our experiences.  Many people, don’t know what they don’t know.  It is when you know what you need to know, you learn more and find out why?

                                                                                                                                   Julie Finch-Scally

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