On learning to learn
I was thinking about it, and I think that one of the most important, essential and fundamental skills that every person should have is to know how to learn. It's unbelievable, but I think most people don't know how to learn by themselves, and it's alarming, I blame this on the education system, which takes children from a very early age and teaches them only to trust authority and repeat what they have been told, teaches them only to obey, not to think, and in no way teaches them to learn, as many people falsely believe. If you put on an exam something different from what you were taught, even if you are right, you will fail, your dissent will not be tolerated, they are not interested in starting a discussion about what is true, they are interested that you repeat what they have told you as a good student that you are, and accept what is dictated from above. In this consists all their teaching, and this is the only thing you are going to learn, you are going to learn that they have the truth, and you don't, and if you want to advance, you will have to accept it, and if you refuse, you will not succeed, you have to remember that the great geniuses and revolutionary minds are generally disowned by this same system. Your mind is their receptacle, and they will take care of filling it. And it is impossible for a person to learn to learn in this way because the student himself is simply a passive subject during all his years of education.
You need to be an agent, you need to be active and always eager to know the truth. You need to have the will to learn by yourself, because many people have become accustomed to someone else thinking for them, and chewing the knowledge to be able to digest it, that makes us dependent, makes us need an intermediary to know the truth, and that really puts us in a very bad position when facing the world. And we can see the effects of this on people very often, I mean, how many people are not paying relatively high amounts of money to learn about blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies when there is abundant and freely accessible information about it all over the Internet to learn for oneself. This is just one example. For most people it is simply easier to have someone else teach them what they need to learn rather than learning on their own, because they have become accustomed to that. It's easier that someone else do the work for us, learn everything they need to learn and draw their own conclusions, and then we learn that. I think it's becoming very difficult to have to think for ourselves.
We have to learn to be self-taught, and I don't say that there is something wrong with having teachers, sometimes it can be very helpful —as long as they are good teachers—, but we cannot depend on them, we need to become independent and begin to demolish all the obstacles that we have put between us and knowledge, to do away with the image that we need someone to tell us what is true and what is not, someone to think for us, we must begin to build a bridge to the truth. And that will only happen when we learn to learn, because then we will know that, not always, but most of the time, the only thing that separates us from the truth is the will to know it.
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