There was always this apprehension as we got older that it’s harder to go back into school, especially after working for a few years. I had asked a bunch of people what their thoughts on that were, and they expressed that it was just harder to learn, harder to capture certain ideas as we aged.
I wonder two things:
- What were the implications of study? What does studying mean to them?
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What were hard ideas that they struggled to understand?
With no intention to sound boastful, or that I know completely everything, which I obviously don’t, I think that it’s an innate fear that we grew up with. I say this from my own experience in the past half a year studying.
When I was younger, and I was told to study, I found myself so afraid, and anxious about studying. I was afraid I wouldn’t learn things well enough to score, I was afraid that the way I was learning would be wrong, and that I would apply my understanding incorrectly. School was not nice about it either, I did not do well, for all the memory regurgitation. On other subjects they needed an argument of sorts, that needed to be written into a British format that made it easier for everyone to read. But guess what, I didn’t do any of that, and I failed horribly at many subjects that I might have actually enjoyed, without the fear.
But when I entered into university, I found myself enjoying the studying process, because I was learning what I wanted to learn. I enjoyed it, I didn’t ask how or why this topic would fall into regular everyday life. And it was all good.
Now entering into bible school, I carried some anxiety, because it wasn’t all I wanted to learn, and I wasn’t sure if I agreed with some of the methodology, or the pedagogy. And yet, here I am, happy to be learning once more. It has been great fun.
So my thoughts on the apprehension of studying older, would be that we’ve wrongly assumed what it meant to study, and studying might not be as tiresome as it could be.
What about hard ideas?
I think ideas are difficult any age we are in. Children struggle with the idea of a mouth and how to place food inside it. Teenagers struggle with the idea of punctuality, and commitment, and just leave everything to chance, as per divine whim and fancy of a emotional god. Adults actually struggle the most, with making the world around them, the world that they were told it should be.
We know that the world never turns out the way that it should, and we know that no matter what our plans are, sometimes things just don’t turn how the way they should. Could that be because of something? Could it be misunderstood? We are always not sure, and we can never really be sure. What our children will be like, will any of our friends leave us tomorrow, will we even wake up tomorrow? We are formed by a lot of what expect, and sometimes learning makes us questions these things that we expect.
So I think hard ideas are ideas that are hard to accept as truths, because we need to relearn about the world around us. It doesn’t mean that we’re not learning, but we’re not agreeing internally about what we learn. And that’s okay.
So is it easy to study when you’re older?
I think it’s important not to assume that we know answers to anything, even the answer to this question. Some people might agree that it is easier, because you know more already. Others would use that exact argument, on the flip side, as I have. It is harder because you need to unlearn so much already.
But in this modern society, we are always given the space to question the teacher now, and we can ask, I know this from real life, why is your answer correct? This would help us to learn, instead of just rejecting a teachers answer straight up.