I’ve always appreciated Mark Twain’s advice of not allowing school to get in the way of your education. This isn’t to knock the benefits of our school curriculum but rather to acknowledge that the courses offered by our fine institutions provide only part of the skills and knowledge our students need to succeed in this world. Not only to succeed, actually, but to make impacts and advance our society beyond where we are today.
And what a timely discussion this is, as we turn a fresh crop of graduates onto the world!
The pace of change in our communities and economies has created a situation unparalleled in our history. Historically, we dealt with changes on a generational basis—that is, the new generation could learn from the previous generation, building on existing procedures, methods, or systems.
Generally speaking, we took what our parents did and enhanced them, without engaging in much reinvention. In most cases, you could choose your trade or practice and then work that job successfully until retirement through natural learning and adaptation.
This is no longer the case. A university student in a four-year program may notice that by the time they graduate, the knowledge they learned in their first year is bordering on obsolescence.
In many cases, we are preparing our students for tasks that don’t yet exist, that will use technology that hasn’t been invented yet, through methodology that is still in development.
So how do we prepare our youth and ourselves?
Perhaps we should place our focus on the fundamentals of the human spirit. Since the pace of change is fast, and getting faster all the time, it will be critical for us to teach our young people how to adapt. If today’s curriculums are bound to be obsolete before too long, we should inspire in students a love of learning rather than focusing on the material itself.
In other words, perhaps we can teach how to learn rather than what to learn.
Ingenuity, adaptation, creativity, curiosity… these are the traits previously reserved for and required by our civilization’s great thinkers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Now we all must learn them. This will require enormous efforts by our educational institutions, yes, but also by society as a whole.
To impart this wisdom, we’ll need to take a cooperative and combined approach.
Successful learning depends on having a willing pupil and a diligent teacher; we all take on both roles at various times, and we must be conscious and reverent of the part we play, looking for ways to both gain and impart wisdom, even if it seems non-traditional.
What did you learn from your first employer? Or perhaps it would be a better question to ask, what do you wish you had learned?
We need only look at ourselves to realize that our assets, and opportunities, are the result of a wide range of own experiences. We carry within ourselves a little bit of everything we’ve ever seen, heard, and done. And yes, we take with us parts of the people we’ve met. The neighbour next door, the community leader, the stranger with whom we strike up a conversation… every relationship is an opportunity.
And then we take all of this and make it our own, incorporating it into who we are. In this way, the world is our classroom.
Perhaps the attribute that will best prepare us all is humility. Humility is so much more than the absence of ego; it’s the acceptance of our shortcomings, our lack of knowledge, that makes us willing pupils. Having grace for our own errors allows us to have grace for the ignorance of others. Grace and humility are key attributes for nursing effective relationships, and they pave the way toward the relational approach to both learning and teaching that we all need.
Class is now in session! No textbooks required.
