Saturday, April 7, 2007

Learning purely by chance

I've been given the following quote to chew on:

"Learning is not attained by chance,
it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence."
-Abigail Adams

and I don't know that I agree with it. I think that a huge amount of learning is attained by pure chance. There are all kinds of things we learn from the people around us that they don't even intend to teach us, let alone for us to intend to learn it! Sure, there are times when I will sign up for a class, where my sole purpose is to learn, or times I will pick up a book, wanting to know more about a particular subject. But it is most often in everyday life, when I least expect it, I will learn something that broadens my mind. I almost always have this happen in conversations with my friend, Jason. We talk about things both silly and serious -- and I almost always have a moment in the conversation where I say "hey, file that away for future reference!" because we seem to learn together, as we just talk! So, I have to respectfully disagree with ol' Abigail on this one.

1 comment:

Mel said...

Yep. Me and Abbie will argue this one! LOL