Archive for the ‘Self-education’ Category

The tension of lifelong learning

Thursday, November 14th, 2019

I am firmly in the camp that believes that lifelong learning is directly linked to living life to the fullest. I believe that, when we stop learning, we start dying.

That tension has come to a certain head for me in the past couple of years as I have discovered that I have slowed down in my own intentional pursuit of learning. There are a variety of reasons for that slow-down, some legitimate, others not, but the result has been that I can feel my mind slowing down and taking my body with it.

I believe that central to that slowdown is the fact that I have not pursued an organized and intentional path of learning for quite a long while. Random learning has its place, but intentional learning is a practice and a discipline that helps form the entire mind and body into something better than what it was before the pursuit.

I do not yet have good answers as to what or how I will pursue intentional learning yet, but I believe being aware that it needs to happen is the first step in pursuing the solution and producing a result. Stay tuned here for more on this journey I am beginning.

DLH

An act of hypocrisy?

Sunday, April 15th, 2012

There is always a certain risk in taking a strong position on something. Among my strong positions has been that of questioning the value of higher education degrees and higher classroom academics in general.

Yet, lurking beneath the surface of that position has always been an element of hypocrisy that I have tended to avoid : I have accumulated well over 350 quarter hours of higher academic instruction over the past 20 years and it is very possible that I will return to a formal academic setting in the near future.

What’s worse is that this hypocrisy contains in itself another hypocrisy: I may yet return to a higher academic setting because I have access to a taxpayer-funded educational benefit I became qualified for as a result of military service that would allow me to receive this higher academic instruction for free.

Nevertheless, despite all of my rhetoric and vitriol against both things, the siren song of returning to the classroom fills my ears and my heart. The thing that holds me back is my realization that returning has the potential to undermine positions that I yet still believe to be true.

The dichotomy in this dilemma is that everything I could learn in that classroom is something I could teach myself, but if I return to the classroom, I can learn these things with very little personal cost to me except time and a little travel. Either way, I will be better than when I started, but going one way seems to be a matter of–perhaps self-defeating–principle, while going the other way seems like an act of–perhaps self-defeating–pragmatism.

At some point, I will have to make a choice, and in doing so add yet another element to my long-standing conflict about higher education. Either way, some will mock me, and perhaps, I deserve it either way.

DLH

Are we living in a post-academic world?

Monday, February 13th, 2012

My aggravation with the modern education system is well-documented, but part of that aggravation is based on a legitimate question: have we entered into a post-academic era?

For a long period of history, the best and sometimes only way to learn something was to gain that knowledge from someone already considered an expert in whatever the field of pursuit might have been. Whether those people were great prophets, philosophers, teachers, master craftsmen, or professors, they represented the gateway to knowledge for the learner.

Mankind has long sought to collect all of that learning in various forms, but it was not until the latter part of the 20th century that the collection began to reach critical mass, first with the ease and speed modern publishing achieved and then with the advent of the internet and the world wide web.

The 21st century and the world wide web has ushered in a new idea in the history of learning. Granted, the accumulated knowledge of millennia of human history must sill be complied by the learned people of our own era, but subjecting ourselves to their presence and will is no longer required. For anyone motivated enough, it is possible to learn just about anything anywhere for free by simply seeking out the information and applying oneself to it.

This reality then begs the question whether the system of formal academic training currently the institutional requirement in most parts of the world is really necessary. Granted, some kind of system needs to exist, but the question remains whether it needs to look anything like the one we have now.

Modern home schooling, professional certification systems, free online education from existing academic institutions, and the maker movement give us a tantalizing glimpse of what a post-academic education system could look like. These phenomena represent a method of education targeted at the learner, utilizing far more personal interaction, allowing for mentoring and apprenticeships, and allowing for a far greater depth and breadth of exploration than most traditional academic settings.

Further, the potential post-academic model seems to encourage the same kind of sharing of information in a free and unrestricted way that allowed it to come into existence to begin with. Spend only a little time at home school, professional, or maker gatherings, and one will see an exchange of ideas and information unprecedented anywhere else.

I understand that a transformation from the current academic model to a post-academic model will have to be slow and measured, but I also think that transformation is almost inevitable. There is far too much information freely available to anyone who wants to find it to continue to justify the immense expense for rapidly diminishing results of the current academic model.

The question that remains is how each of us will pursue this post-academic transformation.

DLH

Addenum: As if they read my mind, MIT is now offering enrollment in its first automated, online course which it is offering for free.

When it’s no longer Greek: a self-education goal for 2011

Saturday, January 1st, 2011

Graecum est; non legitur

One of the fundamental truths of understanding, I believe, is that one must know what was actually said and done, not just what someone else has to say about it. Over the past decade, I have delved deeply into my understanding of the collection of texts that comprise the Bible and have discovered that I cannot progress much further until I know what it is trying to say in the languages its authors used to write it.

While biblical Hebrew is a bit beyond me just yet, I decided that I will take the next year (likely the next two) to teach myself to read biblical Greek and, eventually, classical Greek. My hope is that, by learning this language, I can expand my understanding to another layer of what at least the New Testament has to say and to expand my horizons along the way.

In pursuing this course, I am relying on the advice of a friend who already reads biblical Greek and who is on his way to Africa to put that skill to use as a Bible translator. On his recommendation, I will be using the following tools along with consultation with various Greek readers I know:

Along with:

I keep anyone reading this post apprised as I progress.

DLH