Being Well-educated

Recently, in a conversation with my 20 year old son, we were discussing the problem of leaving the lights on.  He lives in the lower level of our house, and I had noticed that he and his brother would frequently leave the house for hours or even overnight, while leaving several lights on in their area.  Such behavior results in an electric bill that is higher than it needs to be, therefore wasting both electricity and money.

In the same discussion, I mentioned that another way of saving on the electric bill is to use fluorescent lighting instead of incandescent lighting.  I explained that a fluorescent light bulb generates light with a relatively small amount of electricity, which causes the gas in the bulb to glow, whereas in an incandescent bulb, the electrical current passes through a fine wire, and it is the resistance in the wire that causes the wire to glow.  Much more electricity is needed to overcome the resistance in the wire than is needed to make the gas in a fluorescent bulb glow.

For me, the fascinating thing about this discussion is that I had never thought about the difference between the two types of light bulbs, at least not that I recall.  Specifically, the physics that explains the difference I would have studied in college, and that was 45 years ago. I just cannot remember ever learning it, and had no reason to have learned it since then, unless maybe I read about it in an article on reducing one’s electric bill.  I had to conclude that I know what I know about light bulbs because, generally speaking, I am well-educated.

Lots of times, I will be in a conversation with a student who is complaining about having to learn so much.  It is the case with learning in school, that often we are learning something in detail, to do well on a test and to compete with classmates, without knowing the “relevance” of what we are learning.  “Why do I need to learn this?  How is this relevant to anything? They say you forget 90% of what you learn, so what is the point?” Actually, as an expert of the brain, I would suggest that most of what we learn is stored in our memories.  Using hypnosis to retrieve memories is a good example of remembering something that would seem to have been forgotten.

The value of learning is often a matter of delayed versus immediate gratification.  As a doctor, I will tell you that everything a medical student learns will be valuable at some point in the future.  The more knowledge you have in your brain, the more you have to think with, and the more you have to understand and enjoy the world around you.  It becomes a delightful thing, when 45 years after learning physics, I know something about light bulbs that I did not know that I knew. That is fascinating to me!

Another good example is math.  We learn about math in school not because we are going to be using that arithmetic later in life, but because learning math is about learning the intellectual skills of problem-solving, of thinking in analytical and critical ways, and it is about getting it exactly right when it is important to be precise.

Everything you learn you will use at some point and in some way.  You may or may not be aware of knowing it, but you learned it at some point. And if you are aware of it, then you may enjoy knowing about it and talking about it many years later.  Emphasis is on “enjoy”, as in “Love, Joy and Peace”. And remember that learning is not confined to school.  Most successful people are successful because of what they add to their knowledge base after school.

Learn as much as you can, and the more you enjoy learning, the more you will learn. Be well-educated.  It is what successful people do.