Why Do We Stop Learning?
by Joshua Minton
I came across this quote on my daily calendar today:
Tiny children want to learn to the degree that they are unable to distinguish learning from fun. They keep this attitude until we adults convince them that learning is not fun.Why do people stop learning? There was a time when people got together, they asked the question, "Have you read [this book] by [this author]? And I imagine that more than often, the answer came back in the affirmative. Try that nowadays. 8 times out of 10, you'll get laughed at.
EDUCATOR GLENN DOMAN
So when did illiteracy become the norm? When did that act of not learning become a badge of honor? There is such a deep undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in our society that to make a literaray reference in a conversation is to marginalize oneself or go totally misunderstood to point of having might as well not even have said anything at all.
I already know that you all (my readers) read, as a general rule, but I'm interested in hearing your thoughts about this issue.
Other Posts in the Category: Politics & Sociology
This blog was originally posted on January 12, 2007
The BWP Comment Policy
Guest are encouraged to leave comments here; you do not have to register an account. All that I ask is that you be respectful of the other readers of this site and its host. Stick to the ideas being expressed and you should be okay. Get personal and you might not like the results. Thanks for reading.It may very well be that the average person reads fewer books now than a few decades ago (I would want to see hard data for specific periods of time, though, rather that "there was a time when....."). Books are competing with TV and, more recently, the internet. The latter, at least, is often a more efficient way of accessing information. I have not stopped reading books, but much of my ongoing learning uses the internet.
There's no denying that schools make learning a drag in some ways. I think this is more to do with ideology and faddism creeping in than with anything profound about the culture. I can remember being baffled by all the gobbledygook of "new math", and the "whole language" fad seems to have similarly stultified the reading development of millions of children. But many parents do understand what's at stake -- see the rising popularity of phonics programs and home-schooling.
It's true that we seem to be more often in contact with people who seem appallingly ignorant and uninterested in intellectual subjects. But is it really true that there are more such people today than there were, say, thirty years ago? I suspect that they were there -- but if you yourself were the kind who read a lot, you didn't "get together" with such people very much. People of different educational levels probably mix more now than they did then.
I've dealt with a closely-related issue (the frequent claims that the quality of English usage is deteriorating) in this posting on my own site.
I think this is also of interest.