“2,055 Brown Recluse Spiders Were Collected”: 30 “Today I Learned” Facts, From Shocking To Cool

“I think it goes without saying for most people that learning is a vital part to being human, whether we call it formal education, ‘life lessons’, gaining experience, acquiring wisdom, or anything else,” Assoc. Prof. of history at Southern Utah University Dave Lunt said, discussing the importance of learning with Bored Panda.

“From the time we are babies, people are learning about their world. And I believe that we never stop learning, although we often go from formal learning to informal learning when we leave school (at whatever age, at whatever level). I would like to think that people remain hungry to learn throughout their lives, but—of course—this is not always the case. Sometimes, as we get older, we grow complacent in our conclusions and our beliefs, but I think one of the goals of formal education is to inspire students to remain ‘lifelong learners’ after they complete formal studies.”

Lunt noted that there are lots of different ideas about what the goal of education should be, from securing a good job, to inspiring responsible citizenship or living a “good" life. “One of my favorite characters from history is Socrates; at least the version of Socrates that we learn about from his student, Plato. Socrates is a good example to me of what a ‘lifelong learner’ might look like,” he shared.

“In 399 BCE, Socrates was put on trial in ancient Athens, and Socrates's speech at that trial is called his Apology. Socrates's Apology—as told by Plato—is not him saying ‘I'm sorry’, but the word refers to Socrates's defense for his actions. Socrates annoyed a lot of people, I'm sure, by constantly asking questions and poking holes in people's assumptions, but at his trial he offered one of the best justifications for learning that I know of. Socrates made no apology for his curiosity. He told the jury of Athenians that ‘the unexamined life is not a life worth living’.

“The word usually translated as ‘unexamined’ is ἀνεξέταστος, and it means something like ‘not looked into’ or ‘not inquired into’. It may not be exactly what Socrates meant, but I like to think of this sentence as a reminder to always be examining my own life, my beliefs, what I know, and what I'm learning,” Lunt explained, adding another interesting fact to our ‘Today I Learned’ list.

As Assoc. Prof. Lunt mentioned, quite often learning extends way beyond graduating school or university. Some people are so curious, they never stop learning, and Socrates was seemingly one of such people.

“Of course there are more ways to learn than merely sitting in a classroom or listening to a teacher. Going back to Socrates, he very famously was not a paid teacher. He didn't work in a school. But he was extremely curious and always hungry to learn. In one of Plato's dialogues, Socrates asks another philosopher named Phaedrus to forgive him for his many questions, since he (Socrates) is ‘φιλομαθὴς’ (philomathes), which translates more-or-less to ‘a lover-of-learning’ [or ‘fond of learning’],” the expert noted.

“If someone like Socrates, who was so smart and had many people looking to him as a teacher, was eager to learn, that drives home to me the importance of curiosity and inquiry. The world is a big place, with a lot of knowledge in it. We would all do well to learn as much as we can, whether it is in school, on-the-job, or ‘life lessons.’ There is always something out there for a curious person to learn.”

Discussing the internet’s influence on people’s willingness to or interest in learning nowadays, Lunt pointed out that it sure makes it easier to find information. “I am Generation X, so firmly in middle age, and I remember life before the internet pretty well. Even today, I am consistently amazed at how easy it is to find basic information on the internet – trivia, names, dates, things like that. I spent a lot of hours in college digging through books, flipping through pages, trying to remember where I had read or seen some fact or idea. Now all of that is readily available with a few keystrokes and a search engine.”

“I suppose that psychologists and educators and lots of other smart people are studying the effects of the internet on human learning, education, memory, and other fields,” the historian continued. “But for me, the advent of the internet has made it easier to find facts and yet made it more difficult to think originally and creatively. Curating a limitless trove of information, some of it accurate, some of it inaccurate, is an impossible task and so, with the internet, ‘learning’ (for me) has shifted to interpretation of sources, understanding cause-and-effect, assessing reliability, and similar processes.

“So, of course, the internet has made it so very easy to learn something new each day; especially via curated and interesting outlets. However, by the same token, the internet has made it easy for inaccurate or incomplete information to spread.

“Internet sites often offer interpretations that deserve more scrutiny, or opinions disguised as facts. This, I think, makes it all the more important for us to remain ‘lifelong learners’ in order to interpret information and assess reliability, and to be willing to update our conclusions when new information emerges. The internet is an enormously consequential and important tool for learning, but we shouldn't let it do our thinking for us,” Lunt emphasized.

Summing it up, Assoc. Prof. Lunt suggested that having a learning mindset is one of the most important assets that people can have today, especially younger people who are looking for careers and starting out on their paths in life. “Being a learner shows humility – nobody knows all of the answers but we don't always like to admit it. Even Socrates famously announced at his trial that the only thing he really knew was that he didn't know anything.”