Definition: (1) having or showing profound or extensive education; well- informed; erudite; (2) boffin <a person with a unique knowledge or skill>; (3) quick-minded <learning come easily and with clear comprehension>; (4) scient <learned; having knowledge, information, or skill>; philology <love of learning>
Sayings:
• Ab uno disce omnes (Latin): “From one, learn to know all.”
• Docendo discimus (Latin): “We learn by teaching.”
• Fas est et ab hoste doceri (Latin): “It is right to learn, even from an enemy.”
• If you can’t say, “I don’t know,” you don’t learn.
Quotes:
• As soon as you say you know the answer there is no where else for you to go. You can stay where you are or repeat where you have been. — Gerard “Jerry” Vincent Hubert Downs (1949-) American photographer & writer
• Space for Copernicus was not the same as space for Newton, and space for Newton was not the same as space for Einstein. We always learn a little bit more. — Carlo Rovelli (1956-) Italian physicist
• Ninety- two percent of what you learn is linked with something that you learned before you were 10 years old! — Gloria Frender, American educator
Note: Connect what you want to learn to something already known, but also link the new material with something strongly desired.
• [Merlin:] The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder in your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn – pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics – why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough. — Terence Hanbury “Tim” White (1906-1964) The Once and Future King {1958}
Note: What Mr. White does not mention are the emotional and, especially, the spiritual levels of learning which are learned along with the ones he does mention.
Reflections:
• The difference between what you’ve learned and what you’ve become is the difference between a memory imprint and a soul imprint.
• A person becomes learned by studying, experiencing, and gathering knowledge. A key is to discover personal ways to assimilate, store, and retrieve information. The final proof is when you can express your learning in an efficient way to someone else, so they appreciate its essence.
Consideration: People arrive at certain plateaus in their philosophies. They arrive there through logic, experience, a flash of brilliance, or simply acquiesce to a belief system. At this plateau there may be a feeling of finality. There are many who stop there, assuming that is the end. Since they’ve got the answer, they think it unnecessary to expand their consciousness.
Observations:
• The essential elements of learning are: instructive, contagious, experiential, fun, and useful.
• Learning is not just the ability to answer questions. Learning is most complete when the learner designs the questions.
Comment: People spend a tremendous amount of time learning the body of knowledge of a particular field in order to build on it without reinventing the wheel. But as the amount of information in the category grows it eventually has to split into subcategories.
Another technique is to build faster tools with which to manipulate the information, i.e., computers. It is the wise person who learns how to find the information rather than trying to memorize all of it.
With the acquisition of qualities, we cannot ignore 90 percent of a quality’s attributes and aspects just because all that has been said about it cannot be absorbed into the brain. Luckily it works on a different level. As we become the essence of a quality, we increase our capacity to assimilate its totality and complexity. Qualities are amorphous and flexible enough to be lived in a wide range of situations.