thoughts, words, deeds

learning for life

Prompt: Is what people learn in schools enough for living this earthly life? Or what are some of the things you learned in life that the schools didn’t teach you? And what would be important to teach young people before they start on their own?
Answer any or all of the questions, in any way you wish.

I’m not sure that life prep is what schools are about. We go to school, not to learn life skills, but to gain knowledge about what the world is—facts, not experience, if that makes sense. There are some things in every class that help shape who we are, however, a person can function in society without knowing how to add or write a paper. They won’t do as well unless they can balance their finances or communicate appropriately to the various levels of people they interact with (a friend has a different layer of communication than a boss or a teacher or a child or a student).

We also go to school in order to learn how to interact with people—to learn how they work, to gain friends, to learn what to do when people don’t like who we are, to learn how to contain temper and to move in socially acceptable ways. We learn that in other places too, of course, but for some, school is where we find who are peers are and what our place in their world is.

Of course there are things we need to know and experience that cannot be learned in school. For example, we need to learn how to take care of ourselves, from running the washing machine to feeding ourselves to brushing our teeth to using a vacuum cleaner. We don’t expect to learn those kinds of functional necessities in school, although they are vital to become a fully autonomous adult. A person who never learned how to clean up after themselves is always at the mercy of the person who takes up that burden.

So, the simple answer—no. We don’t learn everything we need to live in school. A person should live so that they learn continually. Every day should give us something more, some new word, some new idea, some way that we can adapt to the world that is changing around us.