Why should we keep learning
Today, Engineer Explains takes on the term "learning" and its conjunction with the term "Education" followed by our opinion on the concept of learning. Hope you like the piece!
Hey reader 🙌 , I am Vaibhav, a budding engineer with an aim to make news more compelling and consumable for everyone.
Isn't it funny how the most elementary ideas can be delved in to discover a plethora of complex extrapolations? Engineer Explains is all about simplifying complex concepts and ideas for a layman while discovering novelties throughout the process.
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I founded Engineer Explains as an initiative to promote general awareness and learning by picking up topics, understanding them to the best of my ability, and then presenting in the most consumable and illustrative way possible. In my pursuit of this initiative, I discovered the importance of general awareness and how our nation’s curriculum inhibits one’s natural ability to develop the necessary general knowledge. This discovery led me to question the conjunction between the terms “learning” and “education”.
In the past couple of centuries, the term learning in the form of “education” has been commercialized to an extent that it can be directly compared to buying a bar of chocolate.
What is learning for you? And why do people learn? Are two questions that we need to understand before we proceed to define the term. Learning for me ranges from building the ability to not make the same mistakes again to acquiring necessary skills for a project or an initiative. And, why do people learn? Well, it started it with the dire need to learn. We learn to survive, Homo erectus learned to hunt because it had to, to survive.
Evolution mandates survival of the fittest, but we as a species have translated the concept to the survival of the smartest because we have the ability to learn, and with it comes the ability to survive. Coming back to the point, Education has made learning general or conventional but is it sustainable? Especially in the Indian education system, we are still following the colonial template of education and it has been hardwired into systems so profoundly that it has removed creativity, innovation, and invention from at least our generation.
And most of us are aware of this situation but what do we do to tackle this? Pursue another course to learn how to “learn”?
I am a firm believer in experiential learning (EXL) and its hands-on approach. An analogy that comes to mind when I think of EXL is the fact that the best approach to learning a sport is to start playing it. EXL after it was conceptualised is being incorporated into modern-day curriculums in the form of case studies, vocational training, etc, and is proven to be more impactful and successful in training individuals. Applying the concept of experiential learning into our lives by incorporating it in picking up from the most rudimentary skills to thorough expertise, would definitely make our lives a tad bit simpler. Building upon the concept, Engineer Explains to a certain extent is a personal project. It helps me pick up topics I am not aware of and then to develop an understanding good enough to be able to write about it.
Another way is to grow from the conventional norms of education by not limiting yourself with the bounds of the degree you have pursued or the industry you work in. The information is all there, what’s missing is the intent. What is stopping you to pick up the topic you wanted to study? The hobby you wanted to pursue or the new project you wanted to start? Nothing will stop you if you build the idea around your head that “To learn is to survive”.
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