Charles Handy writes in his memoir, Myself and Other More Important Things, about the state of learning today:

The way schools are designed goes against the grain of human nature. I firmly believe that we can learn anything, provided we want to enough. The problem is that most of what we are asked to learn in schools does not excite us or interest us. We are asked to take it on trust that it will be useful to us in some distant future, and when you are fifteen, thirty is an age away, out of sight out of mind. As I have discovered for myself, warehoused or stockpiled learning goes off rapidly. All lessons should have a “use by” label attached if they are going to stick.

We have to work with the grain of our children’s interests not ours, to start where they are, not where we are. As it is, children are learning anyway, although it may not be what we want them to learn.

There is a lot of learning going on in society, the trouble is that most of it is not in schools. We learn most when we are working on things that interest us, and for most people those things aren’t in school.

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