Education Makes All the Difference

I’ve found that to remain relevant, you must continue to learn. When you stop your educational development, you are virtually saying that life no longer has meaning. 

The only people who directly have that pronounced reality are those who no longer have life within them. I don’t know about you, but it is my sincere hope that I do not encounter that certification any time soon.

Education enhances the being by challenging the mind to think, develop and produce viable solutions. It opens doors to new avenues of discovery. It opens doors to the adventures of a lifetime. It enables even the most passive individual to grow expertise and build a valuable platform of knowledge on a variety of subjects and situations.

Even with the nominal reading of a simple magazine article or viewing an episode of the History Channel as an example, you will find a virtual cafeteria of new insights suddenly become lodged in the crevices of your mind. You can also gain from encountering an unexpected event and having to find a way to make it work or to correct the issue. Things like that are what make learning the many uses for duct tape to be so educational. Don’t you know that it is hard not to mentally visualize what has been viewed or read in detail as daily encounters come forth? Your mind is always open to hearing and exploring quite often even when we simply desire to “veg out.”

Often I hear things uttered such as “I am too old to learn” or “I think I have learned enough to last me a lifetime.” I quite often laugh but think silently to myself how bad this perspective is for the individual. They are missing out on adding to their skills or even picking up a new skill that might very well address a current or future need they will face. They are overlooking what is being wasted: themselves! Perhaps that is the paradox for those who think education has limits. They fail to understand what they are missing.

Education makes all the difference. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, “Education is either from nature, from man or from things. The developing of our faculties and organs is the education of nature; that of man is the application we learn to make of this very developing; and that of things is the experience we acquire in regard to the different objects by which we are affected. All that we have not at our birth, and that we stand in need of at the years of maturity, is the gift of education.”