To Keep Learning…

We have previously cited this quoted sentence: “The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.” Now we should like to add to it another element: something to learn. We are not living a static life, as suggested by this sentence from an unknown source: “If you were graduated yesterday, and have learned nothing today, you will be uneducated tomorrow.” In looking at learning, past and present, it is sobering to consider how much of change there has been; how few textbooks, for example, from which we were once taught, have since survived, especially in technical subjects. Sometimes young people lose faith, or become confused, because of some theory or supposed finding, and later learn that what they lost their faith for has since been abandoned or modified by further findings—and so they lost their faith for little real reason. We all have to keep learning. “We shall never see the time when we shall not need to be taught…” Adults have to keep learning long after they have left school. All people in all professions have to keep learning—or they will soon find themselves far behind. And anyone who thinks because he has a label, because he has acquired credits and credentials, or because he has a degree, that he can now relax and wait for things to come his way, has thought what simply isn’t so. He has yet to prove that what he has learned can help him be profitable and productive, not forgetting the great investment that parents and others have in him, and not forgetting also to pay some part of his debt to the past. Smugness in learning, conceit in learning, is never becoming to anyone. We must constantly keep a mind open to truth, a simple faith, and humility. Within a framework of standards, of principles, of keeping the commandments, we need to keep a flexibility in our lives for the continued revealing of truth, for the further finding of facts. “…Something to do, something to love, something to hope for” and something always to learn. “We shall never see the time when we shall not need to be taught.”