#6 – Persistent learning
“Persistent learning” is an important purpose of the Open Design Learning. Sometimes we call this “teaching to learn”. Our inspirators have already indicated this theme long time ago. However we believe that especially within the period of digitized learning where knowledge transfer is the only key, it becomes more and more important to stress the other side of learning : incite and or to open mind the student.''
To further incite you on the persistent learning purpose, see e.g.:
Russell Ackoff : Turning Learning Right Side UP (education back on track)/ Part III Envisioning ideal lifelong education
…… The passion for lifelong learning—tireless, all-embracing, persistent learning—manifests itself in every person from the moment of birth. Ideally, during the early years, children should have the opportunity to explore the world around them freely; they should be allowed to figure out, in their own way and at their own pace, how to handle the objects and people they come into contact with so that they can fashion for themselves a model of reality that will develop in scope and in depth as they proceed through life. The common view is that children are rather passive creatures at birth and, unless there is constant active stimulation by adults, they will not develop properly. This view is also widely held to be true for older children, even adolescents. What it amounts to is a belief that the human animal is static by nature and might stay put at any particular state of development at which it has been left alone; that action is needed on the part of adults to bring out a child’s potential for development, which she is not capable of realizing on her own. However, anyone who observes children closely soon comes to the conclusion that they cannot grow up and master the world quickly enough. Nature endows them with the innate drive to become adults. A child knows all too well the gulf that exists between himself and grown-ups, and is eager to bridge that gulf to reach the adult levels of achievement that he sees all around him. Indeed, only an enormous effort can stop a child from realizing her tremendous drive to grow and mature. This drive is a fundamental characteristic of young animals that is essential to the survival of species throughout the living world. It is during the early years that human beings engage in the most intense and comprehensive learning of their entire lives—and virtually all of it is self-initiated and self-motivated, with little help from adults who act as “teachers.” …..
Rudolf Steiner: Education as a Force for Social Change / Part II The social basis of education (lecture 2)
……..These matters must be known today and must be studied unreservedly. My present observations have an educational purpose insofar as I believe that from the aspect from which I am speaking today — not perhaps in accordance with the way in which I speak — teachers must, above all, have each stage elucidated. We have to outgrow what previously has prevented teachers hearing of these great world events. Because of this we are experiencing today the comfortless fact of how entirely ignorant a great part of the population were politically. Today we meet people — in this instance I cannot politely say “present company excepted”, at least not in all cases — who do not know what has been going on for decades in the most external affairs, for instance in the workers' movement; these people have no notion what form the struggles of the proletariat have taken during these decades. Now an educational system that turns out into the world men who pass one another by, and know nothing of each other, must surely be a factor leading to collapse. Are there not in the middle class today those who scarcely know more about the workers than the fact that they wear different clothes, and details of that description; who know nothing of the struggles going on in trades unions, in associations, in political parties, and have never taken the trouble to look into what is taking place all around them? Now why is this? It is because people have never learnt to take lessons from life, because they always learn some particular thing. They think: Ah, I know that, I am a specialist in that sphere; you know something else and are a specialist in some other sphere. — People have become accustomed to this without ever getting beyond what they have absorbed as knowledge at school, considering this as an end in itself, whereas the important thing is learning to learn, — Learning to learn, so that, however old one is, one can remain, up to the very year of one's death, a student of life. Today even when people have taken their degree, as a rule they have exhausted their powers of learning by the time they are out of their twenties. They are unable to learn anything more from life; parrotwise they reel off what they have absorbed up to then. At most they have, now and again, an inkling of what is going on. Those who are different are exceptional. It is important that we should discover an educational method where people learn to learn, and go on learning from life their whole life long. There is nothing in life from which we cannot learn. We should have different ground beneath our feet today if people had learnt how to learn. Why nowadays are we socially so helpless? It is because facts are confronting us on a level to which men have not grown. They are unable to learn from these facts because they have always to confine themselves to externals. In future there will be no education that bears fruit if people will not trouble to rise to the great points of view in human culture………
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