We are inheritance, we are matter, we are innate and we are learning. These elements outline our essence as human beings and involuntarily create our own version of being. Since the first three are given to us, we will talk about learning. Let's say it's the great potential of people.
The fetus begins to learn at the moment in which it has a sufficiently consolidated structure to be able to interact with its environment. The latest studies suggest that this happens at 4 months of gestation.
Indeed, we are active and unconscious victims of learning, because before oxygen enters through our nostrils for the first time and we begin to use our lungs, we are already learning. That is, while we are forming in the womb of our mothers, we are really preparing to socialize, adapt to the environment and be able to live in society.
And this is where learning and education coexist. Learning is born with life, and education goes hand in hand with learning. In this way, we will consider learning as something personal, our own, intimate and particular, while education will be, mainly, something collective, common, interactive and social.
WE LEARN> WE CHANGE> WE PROGRESS> WE LEARN
In the most simplistic sense, learning means applying a valid response to an internal or external stimulus in order to survive, while in the broadest sense, learning implies satiating the curiosity of existential doubts. As we people attribute the meaning, here is a reversible dilemma.
There are people who interpret the passage of time as a countdown, others as an opportunity for growth or as the search path towards happiness and fulfillment. This has a lot to do with learning, because thanks to education, the moral, the social, the political or the cultural, people choose.
There are people who choose not to learn. Psychology says that learning is a relatively permanent modification of behavior, the result of the exercise of experience.
These people, who despite experience have not changed their behavior over time, were born to survive, they are survivors. They are afraid to explore the deepest part of the human being, that is, life and death, and they deny knowing and feeling. They must learn to learn, or better yet, they must unlearn, because in their dogmas is the cause of their unhappiness.
Today science shows that emotional competencies explain the difficulty in learning; so negative emotions can damage learning and disable thinking. Learning to survive has been the most primitive challenge that the human being has had. In the XXI century, when you learn exclusively to survive, you run the risk of losing interest in life as an opportunity to fully develop the human condition and, above all, you run the risk of falling into intellectual obsolescence, causing a threatening conflict between the person and a world that advances as never before, in terms of technology and information.
There are other people who have made the decision to explore within and outside of themselves. They live to learn.. And in this small nuance so closely linked to learning, is the silver lining of happiness.
These are people who undergo a profound transformation and not just a change in behavior. They choose what they want to learn, what they need to learn, and what is worth learning. They find no truce to satisfy their curiosity, they feed on novelty, surprise, knowledge, they contemplate their lives as the transition through different paradigms and conceive the magnitude of the universe as their main nutrient.. The slightest experience becomes a new opportunity for learning.
Gratitude is the word that best defines the feeling of a conscious learner who is seduced by new ideas that shape chapters of his life. For this reason, we cannot consider a science as absolute knowledge, and less in the field of education, because the person is the result of the interaction between different physical, organic, emotional elements, etc.. Trying to find answers from a single science or a specific area of knowledge, is to skew the essence of who we truly are.
So, live to learn or learn to live, don't forget that the common denominator is always learning; that very particular quality of the human being that connects him with his environment and with what he really is.
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