The End of Education
On a recent flight to Barcelona I got talking discussion with a passenger sitting next to me about the process of learning. He was on his way to a conference on something neurological, and I was on my way to meet a Client whose teenage children had lost their way academically. At one point he commented that young children are so full of questions but by the time they get their PhD they have stopped asking them.
I was reminded of his comment today when I read a summary from a recent applicant. The applicant had written, as his opening sentence:
“I am a friendly, easy-going and out-going young man who has just finished education.”
As far as I can tell from his CV (we are not allowed to ask for actual ages) the “easy-going…young man” in question appears to be around 22 years old and has recently completed an MSc in Molecular Neuroscience from a Russell Group university. How ironic given the profession of the man I met on the plane. Without getting to a doctorate he already feels, at the ripe old age of 22, that he has “finished his education.”
Obviously Tutors International has no interest in employing as a teacher someone whose education has ended.
It is my strongly held view that the best teachers are those who never stop learning. They continue to expand their knowledge of their specialist fields, and they expand into other subjects or interests. They learn from their students and their peers, and they continue to learn from their teachers, their parents, and their siblings. They learn from their friends and enemies, from the successes and failures. Their lifelong pursuit of the search for and sharing of knowledge is evident in all they do. It shouldn’t have a point of inflection let alone an apogee.