on learning

It's an oft used word these days. Learning. It is a virtue, an entire career, a course in schools at all levels, heck, it's a bloody one-liner! However you feel about your work (and the pay), if you can say you're learning, everything else becomes secondary.

I used to feel the same way once. But now I disagree.

I'm beginning to think learning ought to come in small parts. It's difficult to continue learning at a stretch for more than six months. One learns. Then one must be able to apply that in a visible manner - see the results of learning coupled with hard work. And appreciate what would not have been without it. This is the test. After the test is the period of rewards. It must be both at a personal and an inter-personal level. Without this cycle, learning ceases to be have much value. Without any one of stage of the cycle, the next stage cannot arrive - at least not without making its self and the cycle immaterial.

I think the lack of this is what makes the education system largely unsuccessful. Exams and grades are but a feeble excuse of real tests or results or rewards. These have been put in place for the self-satisfaction of those who run the system. Sadly, it causes the value of knowledge to cease until we become immune to what we are taught as well as what we can learn.

Coming back to the cycles mentioned above, we are in multiple such cycles simultaneously. Each one is of different lengths. What I like about the longer ones is that they are the most abstract and that you never know what you have been learning until the learning stage is over and then it suddenly strikes you.