My profession focuses a lot on learning and learning is one of those activities that we often underestimate the complexity of it we tend to think in terms of education when we talk about learning so we kind of pack these two things up into one little box and we say learning is education so as long as we're being educated and quotation marks then we're learning somehow but I found over the course of my life having been student for many many many years and for now being a teacher at a university that The education learning components are often times kind of mutually independent that they're completely separate and that's they're not actually as packed up as we would want them to be some of this is the history of our educational systems that they're not necessarily geared for learning they're more geared for kind of maybe indoctrination is too strong of a word, but some form of like making a single kind of mass-produced human that has some knowledge and abilities.
At the end of the day that they represent those knowledge and abilities as part of their diplomas they have a nice little piece of paper that says, hey we went to this place and we learned these sorts of things and we should have gained these these abilities and skills now learning I think as a massively massively different different than this because so much of education especially ways traditional ways of thinking about education is really wrapped up and to what people often called chalk and talk in quotation talk and talk so it's the idea that back when we had blackboards and chalk that people.
Lecturer would just stand at the front of the room and red on the blackboard and and speak to an audience and that somehow this was learning somehow this was engaging in audience to my new things and acquire new knowledge and in some respects it is there are people who benefit from that form of learning I benefited from that form of learning I loved lectures.
I still love lectures, but that doesn't mean that everybody benefits from that form of learning and so it's important that we take a multidimensional view that we look at learning and even education from many different perspectives. And one of them and I think it's pretty well fundament to a fundament to the learning process is socialization and play so I always say the learning is a social process and there's ample research to back up this so if you're socializing if you're playing even better then you're you can be learning in that process and so I'm often criticized by my students to say, oh your class is too easy or your classes to I actually have fun in your class and that's not a humble brag or anything like that, that's just literally what some of my students have said some of them.
Had much more horrible things but let's just focus on these for a moment because it's important that we don't underestimate the value of socialization and the value of play as part of the learning process we are so kind of structured to think that learning has to be a miserable and difficult and problematic and challenging and well challenging is not bad but like, you know, really difficult and arduous arduous there's a good word aren't you as processed?
It does not and it should not and if we can integrate play if we can integrate socialization into the learning process, then really any everybody starts to benefit. Now I think it's also important that we think about learning not in the strictest sense of okay, I go to school when I come home or even the restrictive sense of oh, I take a bachelor's degree a master's degree or a PhD but we think about learning in the entire life course over the over the entire life course because at any juncture there are ample opportunities to learn and sometimes the learning that we are able to acquire in informal areas of life can be the most valuable I've learned so.
Much from speaking with my older relatives to having conversations with strangers and the bus.
