Why is it that, upon finishing college and entering the workforce, the vast majority of people seem to just stop learning? Is education a period of your life to be gotten over with, a burden that, once borne, is to be set aside for better things?
This certainly seems to be the way we think about it, at least unconsciously. Whenever the topic of education comes up, we immediately think of young people and the formal schooling institutions they attend, and we rarely think of people in their 40s diligently pursuing brand-new fields.
Now, it’s true that young people probably need to focus on education more than adults. But it feels like the drop-off in educational pursuits after college tends to be precipitous and then permanent, and this strikes me as a tragic state of affairs that doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves.
How do we know this learning cliff is real? I suppose it’s largely anecdotal. As the author Scott Young remarks in his discussion on the topic, “the observation seems valid.”
Researchers in this field likewise attest to the existence of a learning cliff. “After formal education and job training ends, many adults experience years, if not decades, of reduced or nonexistent learning opportunities,” write psychologists Rachel Wu and Jessica Church in Scientific American.
There is also interesting evidence in the form of reading rates—arguably a good proxy for learning rates. According to a 2016 Pew study, people tend to read less as they get older, with the most considerable drop off taking place after their 20s.
Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that the learning cliff is real, significant, and ubiquitous. The question then becomes, why do we see such a dearth of lifelong learners? I think there are two main reasons, both of which are connected to formal schooling.
‘I Don’t Have Time’
The first reason why many people don’t continue avidly learning throughout their lives is likely that their vision of how to do education is too narrow. They see education as something that involves taking classes at an institution. But with a career, a family, and hobbies to manage, they simply don’t have room in their schedule for that kind of commitment. As a result, they acquiesce to the fact that lifelong learning simply isn’t a viable option.
It’s not surprising that we’ve come to see things this way. The vast majority of us spent 12 to 17 of our most formative years in these formal schooling environments. We’ve hardly been exposed to any other kind of learning. And if all you’ve ever known of education is formal schooling, is it any wonder that you will come to think learning can only effectively be done through this kind of process?
Whether consciously or unconsciously, we adopt this mentality toward education and then say, “Shucks, I have a full-time job and a family now, so I guess my days of avid learning are mostly behind me.”
The truth, of course, is that there are plenty of ways to learn outside the traditional classroom. You can read books at the public library, you can attend martial arts classes or dance classes, you can follow educational blogs or listen to scholarly podcasts.
You can even incorporate education into the career, family, and recreational parts of your life. On the career side, you can do professional development at conferences and seminars to improve your skills. Part of your family time can be spent learning together, whether that be going to a museum or starting a small family business. And for the recreational part of your life, you can choose hobbies that involve things like arts or athletics—activities where you are building skills and developing mastery.
When you think about it, we actually have a lot of time where we can be learning throughout our lives. But we won’t see all those opportunities until we break free from this idea that education has to be tied with taking classes at a traditional educational institution.
‘I Don’t Like Learning’
The second reason people often stop learning after college is that they’ve gotten the idea that learning isn’t enjoyable. “Thank goodness I’ve finally put that behind me,” they say as they walk out of their last final exam. “Never again.”
I don’t doubt for a moment that these people had a bad experience in school. Lots of people do. But again, the problem is that we have mentally connected learning with formal schooling. People come to hate schooling, and since schooling is how you learn, they assume they must just hate learning.
“Okay,” you might respond. “But if learning is so great, why did I have such a bad experience in school?”
I think the main issue is that school forces people to follow the same curriculum—to learn stuff they don’t care about and then have no time to pursue their real passions. Some other big problems are that it forces everyone to go at the same pace, and to learn in the same kind of environment from the same kind of teacher. When you think about it, there’s an obsession with sameness that permeates traditional schooling.
“What’s gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is one right way to proceed with growing up,” writes John Taylor Gatto in his book Dumbing Us Down.
It reminds me of the Greek myth of Procrustes. Procrustes had an iron bed, and he insisted that everyone who slept in it would fit perfectly. If they were too short, he would stretch them until they were long enough. If they were too tall, he would take care of the excess length by amputating their legs. Drawing on this myth, the word Procrustean is often used by analogy to describe situations where people are forced to conform with arbitrary standards despite the obvious harm that results.
I would submit that the primary problem with traditional schooling, and the reason so many have come to despise it, is that it is nothing short of Procrustean education. Students with a wide variety of aptitudes and interests are made to learn the same things at the same pace in the same kind of environment from the same kinds of teachers. They are forced to fit into the Procrustean bed of the standard K-12 model.
Is it any wonder why they come away demoralized about learning?
The good news is that learning doesn’t have to be this way. College students already have a lot more freedom in these areas. And if we can move away from one-size-fits-all schooling for children, we will not only be improving the lives of millions of young people; we will also be setting them up to continue their learning journey throughout their lives, because they will have the opportunity to experience learning as something that is truly fun.
How to Foster Lifelong Learning
It’s clear that lifelong learning is something worth aspiring to. It allows us to experience novelty and a sense of wonder throughout our lives, it makes us more capable of effecting change, and it makes us better equipped to pass on knowledge and skills to our children. But to create a world of lifelong learners, we’re going to need both a policy shift and a mindset shift.
On the policy side, the biggest thing we can do is to separate school and state. “Break up these institutional schools,” writes Gatto—a public school teacher for 26 years and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. “Decertify teaching, let anyone who has a mind to teach bid for customers, privatize this whole business—trust the free market system.”
The only way for a multiplicity of educational pathways to flourish is to get the government out of the education business. Market competition and consumer choice do a remarkable job everywhere they are allowed to operate in providing a wide array of high-quality options at affordable prices. We have every reason to expect they would do the same in education.
On the mindset side, the first thing is of course to think much bigger about what education can look like. “It is clearly absurd to limit the term ‘education’ to a person’s formal schooling,” writes Murray Rothbard.
But even more than that, we need to get out of this education-then-work life journey that we’ve all subconsciously bought into. Rather than seeing life as 15 years of education followed by 45 years of work, we should see work and education as things that both take place throughout our lives, just with a different emphasis in different seasons.
“These police force devices falsely earmark the educational period,” wrote FEE founder Leonard Read in a 1964 article, referring to the government’s education laws. “They say, ever so compellingly, that the period of education is the period to which the compulsion applies. The ceremonies of ‘graduation’—diplomas and licenses—if not derivatives of this system, are consistent with it. Government education is resulting in young folks coming out of school thinking of themselves as educated and concluding that the beginning of earning is the end of learning.”
Many people see government schooling as one of the great things about our society. But figures like Gatto and Read saw things differently. They saw a system of compulsion and conformity, a system that made education a chore to be gotten over with in the first phase of life rather than a beautiful lifelong journey.
“I can’t teach this way any longer,” Gatto famously wrote in his 1991 Wall Street Journal article “I Quit, I Think.” “If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know.”
Originally published by the Foundation for Economic Education. Republished with permission under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
For more great content from School Reform News.
For more from The Heartland Institute.
