Daily Prompt
Learning
Write a new post in response to today’s one-word prompt.

Live and Learn

The Daily Prompt for the day is the word learning. Learning is an amazing and complex thing. We start learning from the moment we are born and we continue learning until the day we die. If we do not have the will to learn on our own we will still learn from exposure to others. Learning on the job or at the School of Hard Knocks, like trial and error, is lasting learning.

The human brain is designed to retain anything and everything that comes to it through the eyes, ears, and voice. Memorizing, by saying something over and over. The ability to understand more complex information grows constantly. Teachers still use some visual aids and textbooks teaching the elementary grades. Electronic devices are the new teachers.

I went to school my first day at our little country school and evidently wasn’t very impressed by it. My mother told me later, on the second day of school, she said, “you have to get ready for school” and I replied no, “I’m not going to go anymore.” At the age of five, I had made that decision about learning. I was going to be involved in my own learning and not attend school. I learned right away. It doesn’t work that way. My mother said, “You will go to school with your brothers and you will learn what the teacher asks you to learn.” So that was settled very neatly and very quickly.

Our little country school didn’t have a lot of learning resources available for the kids. We had classes one through eight and I don’t believe kindergarten had started yet. There were blackboards on the walls and dusty erasers that required daily cleaning. Erasers need to be dusted off outside, in a cloud of chalk dust, seems like there was a duty roster. Anyone going to the outhouse usually took the erasers along.

There were basic building blocks for the little kids to learn the ABCs and other skills. Books about learning to read Jack and Jill ran up the hill, etc. Nursery rhymes and books of poetry. Music books, “She Will Be Coming Around the Mountain.” The school had a good library to use for information searches. The closest thing to GOOGLE, was the noise when you pushed the button for a drink on the old Red Wing water cooler. We were all in one classroom and could get help from any of the other student willing to lend the teacher a hand. Learning was a good, simple thing.

Now, 70 years later our world has unimaginative learning resources available. Libraries with books are sad things of the past. I’m not sure the little building blocks with the ABCs on them are still around. They now have different shapes for locking and interlocking them together to build things with, evidently, architecture starts in preschool now. There is electronic learning for all ages, from infants to graduate school. Learning rapid speech, finger dexterity and hand-eye coordination are all stressed. This evidently means the world will not be controlled by robots completely, they will need a few people to keep them in tune.

Learning has been a great thing, it has advanced this world to the point that it’s at today, mind-boggling. We have one thing to fear. What if we stop learning? If we let the computers do all of our thinking for us. We could start going the other direction by not learning, that would be a very bad thing. We will keep dumbing down society until the only people needed are a handful of computer experts to keep the computers running.a

https://lghoelson.wordpress.com/