Executive summary: Experience suggests that learners do best when learning about themselves, and that this is why we learn.
It’s easy to imagine that everybody learns for essentially the same reasons. At school, the ostensible reasons for being there and doing the work can appear somewhat monochrome: I attend because they make me; I do what everyone else does; I do it for my family; It will be good for me; What else would I do?
Please don’t misunderstand me: I realize that there are many great students whose motivations are much less shallow than these. I’m simply observing that the reason (or reasons) that we learn are not particularly well defined.
learning is best directed when it empowers us
to learn more about ourselves
You’ll sometimes hear people say “I learn because I enjoy a challenge” – these folk might agree with the metaphor of learning as climbing a mountain. Perhaps we do it for the exercise, the great views on the way up, the muscular euphoria, or the exhilaration of reaching the top?
Others value the knowledge that learning can bring, the wisdom that it delivers over time, the self-affirming sense of deftness that comes from doing something the “right” way. For the solipsist, it’s more about the cave than the mountain!
Many learn in order to improve their preparation, to enhance their possibilities, and to be ready for what life may bring. This viewpoint comes complete with a vision for the future, and a sense that learning is “successful” when it matches that aspiration.
I’m sure there are others who don’t think it matters why we learn. You can imagine a perspective that argues learning is part of our biological condition, the tip of a pyramid that was founded in our primitive evolution, was built upon while we emerged as a species, was amplified during our personal physical growth, and that finally topped out in the development of our individual identities (or perhaps in the expression of our transcendent extensions).
Learn to learn more about yourself. It’s why we learn…
Faced with the question “Why do we learn?”, it is tempting to take refuge in weak reasoning. An example would be to respond “All of the above”. Such a response trivializes the learning spirit that is surely one of the most exquisite facets of human character. Another dead end (fruitless because it’s so obviously true) is the recursive idea that we learn in order to learn more. Yes, of course, but why?
The resolution that works best for me, and seems most in tune with my own practical engagement with learners, is that learning is best directed when it empowers us to learn more about ourselves. Whenever we bring fresh observations of the world around us and process them by reference to what we think we already know or understand, the action informs us of who we are. A self-learner, in this sense, can be the masochist on the mountain, the solipsist in the cave, the visionary optimist, the biological fatalist, or any combination, while building skills to learn more in an idiosyncratic framework .
The bottom line: Learn to learn more about yourself. It’s why we learn, and it’s why we all appear to learn differently.