Replying to LO28964 --
Dear At --
I enjoyed this particular post. Many wonderful and insightful points were
eloquently and clearly made. Here's a little of my thinking on the
subject. . .
The great tragedy of adulthood is that we leave behind the childhood
curiosity that made adulthood possible.
Children naturally know how to learn. They question everything. They
conduct quite sophisticated experiments. They are constantly engaged in
learning.
For many, adulthood is a time of doing -- working or playing -- more than
it is a time for learning. Some may even feel learning is a burden. I
hear this frequently at work. "You mean I have to learn {something}? I
don't have the time or the energy for that."
If you don't have time or energy to learn, then what are you doing with
your time and energy?
Here's a true story.
Where I work, we recently hired a new software engineer. She's young and
fresh out of college. We worked together on her first project. It didn't
take long, and she realized that large software projects are very complex
and challenging. All the "learning" she'd done in college didn't give her
the answers to many of the problems we ran into. She found this
frustrating. After repeatedly coming to me for help, I said to her, "OK.
I'll help you once more, but from now on you've got to stand on your own
two feet. You've got to think through the problems, and come up with
solutions."
A couple of weeks later she came to me to see if I could give her any
additional insights into a particular problem. As we tossed around ideas,
she said, "You know, I had no idea that writing software would make me
think so long or so hard. I'm not sure I enjoy thinking so much."
We talked about that for a while. Eventually it came down to the fact
that she didn't like solving novel problems. She wanted to write software
with a cookie-cutter -- with the cookie-cutter being the stuff she
learned in college. I gave her my interpretation of what college is,
which was quite different from her intrepretation.
I think of college as a place you go to increase your capacity to learn.
I do not think of it as a place you go to learn, so you can go out into
the world and apply, over and over, what you learned in college. The
application of one's formal education comes when one applies the
principles of learning to real-world problems.
We finished the project a few months ago. She moved on, deciding that a
"thinking job" was just too stressful.
It may be that this woman simply didn't enjoy writing software, so moving
on was the right thing to do. But I couldn't help notice that she had an
aversion to reading -- except for the celebrity gossip magazines; she had
an aversion to the news, because she didn't want to have to figure out
"what was true and what wasn't" in the news; she had an aversion to
visual art because "she couldn't understand what a painting was
'saying.'"
My interpretation was that at 21 or 22 years of age, she had given up on
learning.
I cannot imagine why or how she had done this. But its not the first time
I've seen this happen to a person, and I'm sure its not the last.
As for me, I've told my wife that if I ever reach a state where I'm
unable to learn due to illness then its time for me to die. I just can't
come up with a reason to live if I can't learn.
--Benjamin Compton Confidence, n.: Taking off after Moby Dick in a rowboat with a harpoon and a jar of tartar sauce.
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