The Wonder of Learning

When I was three years old my parents began to home-school me.  They had decided to start kindergarten with my sister a year early, she was four at the time, and I flat out refused to let my dad teach her and not me as well. I was so eager to learn, and also a typical younger brother, that I jumped at every chance I was given. I was home-schooled for that year and the next before I even started kindergarten officially. I wanted to know things, and when I did know them I wanted to share them with people, such was my fascination with learning, and perhaps also a little bit in the sound of my own voice, but I truly believe that learning was the main motivation. I found learning wonderful and further I approached it with a sense of wonder, pondering what it might reveal to me next.

As I went through school passing through elementary into jr. high and then high school, that sense of wonder and that attitude that learning was wonderful became harder to maintain. As responsibilities increased, the homework load got bigger, stress began to grow as well and that started to choke out some of the wonder of learning. To often school became a habit, and homework a chore. It became, frequently, simply a means to something else rather than something valued in its own right. Fredrick Douglas in his autobiography wrote about how hard he fought to educate himself, and how he had to barter with the white boys in his neighborhood in order to learn how to read. When learning becomes something that we have almost unlimited access to, we tend to lose sight of what a wonderful resource it is.

In his chapter "The Wonder of Learning", Paul Marshall says, "Real learning occurs when we face something new." It happens when we encounter something that we don't understand and are unsure of how to deal with. As a child I recognized how little I knew and so many experiences were new to me, that there were multitudes of things to learn in order to understand and react to those experiences. Once I grew older, I began to feel that I had a good grasp of things and that prevented me from seeing how new and mysterious some of the issues I was facing were. I lost the wonder in part, because I became arrogant, and to an extent I think everyone does. I thought I knew a good deal and I also thought I knew what it was that I needed to learn. That was one of the biggest mistakes. We don't know what we need to learn. What we need to learn is entirely dependent on those new situations that are presented to us. When we presume to know what it is that we don't know that we need to know, we lose the wonder of learning and replace instead with a hunt where we will return with only rabbits when we were looking for deer.