3 Why Learn?
Ken hadn’t expected to be back in school at age thirty. But then again, Ken hadn’t expected to marry, have a child, and need a new career, either. Ken had no question that his going back to school had everything to do with providing adequately and reliably for his new family. If not for his new responsibilities, Ken would have just continued on with his old job. His old job beat him up a good bit, kept him on the road a lot, and might not have paid great but was otherwise what he knew how to do. This school thing, Ken knew, was going to be a challenge. But he really had no choice. Ken needed it to work out, no doubt.
Learning
Learning is its own reward. And that sentiment goes not only for structured learning in the classroom and curriculum but also for learning from life. Letting the world’s stimuli change one’s behavior into new patterns through which one flourishes is simply a beautiful thing. With beauty comes truth, hope, and goodness. Exhibiting growth out of your potential is reaching up toward the heavens from which truth, beauty, and goodness descend. Learning is thus an act of faith, a devotion of worship to the ultimate ideal who is the author and purpose of life. In that sense, learning is inherently good, requiring no other justification because its justification lies in worship of the ultimate and eternal good. When you devote yourself to learning most effectively, you are refining your worship of all that is good.
Goodness
Don’t miss that profound aspect of learning just described, that learning ties itself firmly to goodness. You might think to the contrary that one can learn something toxic and destructive just as much as one can learn something uplifting, strengthening, and good. Yet that ambiguity is not the true nature of learning. Learning is instead always and inevitably normative. To learn something toxic isn’t to learn at all but instead to unlearn, distort, or corrupt. One doesn’t learn how to be a good murderer or terrorist. Murderers and terrorists are not good. They instead forget how to be good citizens, neighbors, family members, and worshipers. They unlearn citizenship, responsibility, care, and love. When you learn properly, truly learn, you grow in goodness. You refine your character, remove its corruptions, and reform its distortions. If you need a good reason to learn, then make your reason that learning is approaching the almighty creator’s throne. Learn with a passion for the glory of goodness.
Goals
While learning is inherently good, very much like the ultimate good, learning can also have explicit and even mundane goals. As the story at this chapter’s beginning illustrates, your goal for learning may be to get a good job or better job than the one you already have. Your goal for learning may also be to support a family, make your family financially secure, and make your family proud or at least not ashamed of your vocation. Your goal for learning may also be to enter a profession you’ve always admired, perhaps because a parent, grandparent, or respected mentor was in that field. Yet your goal for learning need not be a big goal or long-term goal, either. Your goal may be as practical as wanting to be able to fix your own vehicle, repair your own plumbing, or take better care of your lawn. Your goal may be as adventurous as wanting to speak some of the native language on a planned foreign trip or as superfluous as wanting to be able to paint a decent landscape. Or your goal may be as essential as learning to care for your spouse’s dementia or your child’s autism. Know your goal. Ensure that you choose a curriculum the instructional goals of which align to your goals. And keep those goals in mind to ensure that you progress in your studies.
Motivation
Knowing your goal for learning can indeed be what fuels your fire. Complex academic programs like law and medicine typically require quite a bit of basic learning before students get to assemble the knowledge, skills, and ethics into the desired final performance. The need for patience in slogging through basic learning can be even more true in elementary, secondary, and undergraduate programs, when students may not even know what they’ll eventually pursue and do. So, one needs to balance the willingness to learn and grow generally with the desire to pursue specific goals. Don’t foreclose future goals by failing to acquire broad knowledge and skill bases. If you don’t appreciate why you must learn so much basic math, imagine that someday you might want to be an astronaut or engineer but just don’t yet know. You’d find it a shame not to have the opportunity to pursue a spectacular life’s goal desired later in life because you had refused earlier in life to build a solid knowledge and skill base. Fitting yourself for what you might do but don’t yet know marks the bold adventurer. Prepare for when your time comes.
Capacity
So, much of learning involves preparing yourself for what you might someday do but don’t yet know you’ll do. Yet that inability to foresee one’s future shouldn’t inhibit one’s motivation to learn. Indeed, it should do the opposite. To learn for clearly defined goals, like to pass a licensing exam to be able to get a professional job and earn an income, can certainly be a powerful motivator. But to learn in order to fully develop one’s capacities, so that one can engage wonderful unknown opportunities that are sure to arise, should be much more motivating. After all, which would you prefer: to learn only for a specific goal or instead to learn for all potential goals that your future may offer? We should surely prefer the latter, which speaks to the absolute wonder and allure of learning. Learning to grow in capacity is to expand one’s full horizon of possibilities. Think of it again: would you prefer to study solely to pass a specific arduous licensing exam or instead to give yourself the fullest range of future opportunities? Likely the latter, although the license credential may garner you a great job. Let clear goals motivate you. Let studying and learning simply to expand your capacities motivate you even more.
Potential
You’ve seen, then, that learning has a lot to do with your potential specifically and with potential generally. The world, in all its rich chaos, is nothing if not potential. Possibilities stoke the world, so much so that your role in the world is to draw meaningful order out of its chaotic potential. You can’t be anything, but you can be a lot of things, indeed so many things that you must proceed in order to discern your future. And learning is your tool for doing so. By dedicating yourself to learning, you are all at once expanding, shaping, and discerning your future. Most of the world’s possibilities, indeed nearly all of them, are unavailable to you without learning. What you learn draws out of the world new possibilities for you. You certainly won’t be able to enter certain fields without education and training. No one wants a brain surgeon with nothing more than an eighth-grade education. Yet once you become a brain surgeon, your attainment doesn’t preclude you from other rich futures. If anything, your accomplishment of one learning goal tends to open other possibilities for you. Your experience as a brain surgeon may lead you to become a medical inventor or surgeon general.
Care
Another reason to learn, beyond developing your capacity, pursuing your potential, and as an act of devotion to all that is good, is to be able to care for others. Learning can seem at times like luxurious self-involvement. High school and college undergraduate years, for instance, can be years of substantial self-indulgence, with no spouse and children for whom to care, no substantial job to work, and instead living off mom and dad, loans, grants, and gifts while enjoying general-education coursework mixed with substantial recreation, entertainment, and leisure. Yet those years, properly lived, are also a launching pad into an adult life organized nearly entirely around caring for spouse, children, extended family, work interests, and community interests. Dedicated devotion to those general-education studies can produce the learning that makes a balanced, wise, responsible, faithful, accountable, and useful citizen leader. One has no greater privilege in life than to have the capacity to provide and care for others, whether as a spouse, parent, homemaker, employee, manager, leader, or mentor, or in other capacities. Dedicate yourself to learning, and you’ll not only receive gifts but also have gifts to give.
Health
Learning also keeps you healthy. That fact alone should reveal to us the value of learning. Learning is so essentially a part of our role, purpose, and makeup that we are unhealthy without it. Continual learning is of course essential to the mental and physical development of an infant and young child. Yet learning remains important to the full physiological development of one’s brain, processing, cognition, personality, psychology, emotions, imagination, coordination, and character until one’s mid-twenties. And then learning remains important to the full development of one’s capacities throughout mature life. Even late in life, senior and elderly learners tend to be the healthiest, most active, most socially engaged, most satisfied, and happiest. Stasis is not the human condition. We are instead always growing or always diminishing in capacities. And when we are happily and healthfully learning, those around us benefit, too. Learn for the sake of your good health and the good spirit of those around you, if for nothing else.
Reflection
Can you articulate the connection between learning and the ultimate good? Do you see or sense how pure and sacred learning can be? Do you see a relationship between learning and beauty, truth, and good? Name both some short-term and long-term goals of the learning in which you are currently engaged. Do goals help motivate your studies? Or do you enjoy learning more for the sake of learning? What goals motivate you more, near-term goals or bigger long-term goals? How fully do you feel you are developing your capacities? Could you be doing so more? Or are you already overloaded and need to pace yourself? On a scale of one to ten, to what degree do you feel that you are realizing your greatest potential? Has your learning helped to equip you for caring for yourself and others? Do you have more learning to do in order to better care for yourself and others? Do you appreciate the privilege of being able to care for yourself and others? Are you healthiest and happiest when learning? Can you recall a time in your life when you were not learning and sensed your despair or other loss?
Key Points
Learning is an ultimate and faithful act of devotion to the highest ideal.
Learning is an inherent good, reaching toward beauty and truth.
Learning can have a wide variety of clear and ambiguous goals.
Clarifying your goals for learning can increase your motivation.
Developing your greatest capacity may be your greatest motivation.
Learning is essential to realizing your greatest potential.
Learning enables you to care not only for yourself but also for others.
Learning keeps you healthy throughout life, while aiding others, too.