Love of Learning

The English Archaeologist, John Lubbock once wrote:

If we succeed in giving the love of learning, the learning itself is sure to follow.

I first stumbled onto this quote whilst studying for an Education degree at Colorado State University. This was after I had received my Physics degree from the same institution. I never forgot the quote, but couldn't remember the author. Thank god for Google!

Anyway, back to the point of this blog entry... the love of learning. It seemed to me then as it does now that we spend so much time cramming facts and figures down our gullets that we don't take the time to really appreciate, nor do we really learn to love learning. Sure, we study for twelve plus years as children, then hopefully off to university for more, but along the way do we ever love learning? Or, instead, are we merely caught up in the maelstrom and maladies of the fact cramming masses? Do we take time to really learn how to learn? to think? to reason? How do our educators encourage us to love learning?

One more John Lubbock quote that reminds me of studying in Colorado and the lyrics to a John Denver song:

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.