Lifelong learner’s path to education
No matter how we envisage and plan education, it is not in itself a road but a myriad of pathways to meeting the challenges of life in either magnitude, activity, or direction.
Good day, world! How do I start this journey?
My name is Edith and I am a lifelong learner both by vocation and professionally. I have dedicated 50% of my life and 100% of my energy to becoming the learner I am today.
Since my early childhood years, I have always been conditioned to taking education seriously. As an Armenian, all I have heard was my family and the society at large saying “ You’re no one without education”.
Of course, in a small landlocked post-Soviet country that boasts a 94% literacy rate, skipping the long and laborious education system was unavoidable. Education was raised to a mantra level, yet leaving little room for independent decision making and reflection on the agency of learning.
Children are naturally curious explorers, creative, and boundless in their game situated learning. Like many kids, I have always had an appetite for learning, but not always liked being taught. The main struggles of my younger self, hence, were directed against those natural “killers” of imagination and creativity: vertically imposed schooling, teachers and their top-down “dos & don’ts” that bred “in the box” thinking, and peers who either abided with these “rules” or were voluntarily withdrawn from the process that made no personal sense to them.
Entering adulthood, I realized how a lack of excitement and demotivation to learn robbed my generation of a galaxy filled with wonder and valuable gifts of learning. Simply put, all work and no play made Jack a dull boy. Would I agree to live a dull life? Hardly so.
While the motivation to learn is considered an inborn capacity, it surely became my personality characteristic thanks to the agency of learning. 10 years ago I changed my profession, got a second Master’s degree, and spent 2 years in 2 culturally different countries. The new cultural, academic, and situational avenues helped to identify my values and set up goals in life, gain self-confidence and increase my capacity to intentionally, proactively, and effectively direct efforts towards the achievement of specific goals. I finally reassessed the purpose of education within self-directed learning.
In my opinion, future education should contain only effective, viable, and flexible learning pathways that drive the learners (or, in constructivist terms, scaffold their learning) in continuously growing toward increased self-direction and effectiveness. Such an approach develops motivation to learn because it helps to develop the habits of meaning-making and self-direction — and most of the learning is self-directed.
#wfe1
