I have sat in many classrooms—some I wanted to sit in, some I was told were required. I did enough work and did it well enough to never fail a class. Don’t hold me to this, but I think I made a single D sometime. Only a handful of C’s. I never had to repeat a class. (I do recall some times of abject dread sitting in high school French class, hoping the teacher would not call on me, because I knew I was not prepared.) Along the way, I received report cards, diplomas, credentials, licenses, and certifications. These were tickets for admission to places and opportunities that would have been closed to me without the proper ticket. Many of the tickets granted me admission to sit in the next higher level of classes, earn the next level of tickets, and so on.
Most jobs I have had since I reached adulthood have required certain qualifications based on my educational credentials. Although I could see a direct line between knowledge I attained in school and some of the tasks I performed on the job, many times the lines between my education and job requirements were not as direct. However, more important than whether I gained specific job skills, my educational experiences equipped me to understand the work and communicate effectively with others about the work we were doing.
Learning does not stop with the completion of schooling, though, and much of the knowledge and competencies required for me to do my work came from outside the classroom and the formal educational experiences that resulted in the diplomas and degrees. Quite a lot of the knowledge and skills have come from self-initiated and self-directed study and on-the-job training.
After all, the main point of education is learning. When I taught psychology one of the basic definitions of learning I gave my students was, “Learning is any relatively permanent change in behavior that results from experience.” Learning is an innate process, but a person does have choices about how to engage in learning—what kind of a learner to be. And it is at this point that I see one of the potential weaknesses of formal education: it can create a passivity that leaves learners parked in neutral until someone comes along and puts them in gear with an assignment. At some point, we have to become self-directed as learners, no longer waiting for someone to tell us what we have to learn.
Fortunately, most people become self-directed learners as they reach adulthood, with the motivation for learning being focused on practical needs of the moment. That is, adults are motivated to learn content and skills that will help them solve a real-life problem or achieve a relevant goal. These are characteristics of adult learning described by Malcolm Knowles, who popularized the term andragogy to refer to adult learning. The principles of andragogy apply to younger learners as well. This is demonstrated by the use of student-centered instructional methodologies such as problem-based learning and case-based learning. Indeed, life-long learning has come to be recognized as a need for everyone.
Of course education is about a lot more than job skills. There is much more to life than employment and earning an income. Education—whether formal or informal—equips us to understand the world at large and appreciate the context of time and place in which we live. The study of history, literature, and the arts helps us participate as informed citizens of community and state; we learn to appreciate not only our own but also our neighbors’ cultures. Being informed of principles of mathematics, natural, and social sciences helps us understand the world around us based on reasonable evidence and shields us against false claims and unwarranted assertions of shysters and demagogues.
Moreover, without referents of a common education our capacity to think and ability to communicate are extremely limited. Sometimes the reason people believe outrageous claims is they simply do not know better. All of us are ignorant, just to different levels and on different topics, and one of the aims of a common education is to give a foundation for individual reflection and understanding as well as for group discourse and collective intelligence and problem solving.
This is a good time for learning. Most people can access information on a need-to-know basis–even when the need is simply to satisfy curiosity–literally in the palm of their hands. Of course, this capability opens new horizons of learning and new challenges as we participate in the world wide web, the Internet, and social media. Even as we use information technology to gain knowledge and skills, the technology is learning about us and is constantly adjusting the information that comes our way. In this artificial intelligence mediated environment, we need to be careful not to settle for being spoon fed information someone else is choosing for us. We need to be not only self-directed learners but also self-protected learners.
Garry Breland 