What Is Learning?

As a homeschooling mom, I am a keen observer of my children. Watching them play, learn and doing all kinds of stuff, I have often pondered over what is learning?

Where does it begin? Does it even have an end?

Does it begin when a child is sent to school?

Or does it start happening long before a child is even born, resting away in its mother’s womb? Stretching, rolling, and kicking to the sound of its mother’s heart beating.

Then the child arrives in this world and it knows to have its needs met, it just needs to cry. 

Isn’t it learning for a mother how she knows how to meet her child’s needs? How she learns overtime what cry means the baby needs feeding? Or when it means the baby just needs some warmth and cuddling?

I see it as learning when an infant stretches out her hands in front of her, observing them, putting them together then letting them go, in the process becoming aware of her existence.

Then how a child observes his parents’ faces and adapts many expressions as his own? 

And the miracle of how they learn to talk all on their own! Thinking about it fills me with awe of The Creator.

This goes to show, that learning is not only in the classroom being endlessly instructed or sitting at a desk, filling away workbooks, or just going to college to pursue a degree.

Learning is in acquiring skills and using them for your survival and for the betterment of others around you. 

I have come to learn, that learning is knowing the value of relationships and trying to maintain them. 

There is learning in the people you meet and the stories they tell you.

There is learning in trying to exist in harmony and synchrony with nature and not trample on it and destroy it for every benefit of ours. 

Learning is in observing and pondering over all the signs in nature and coming closer to your Lord through it. 

What was learning for me?

For me learning was to shed off all the years and layers of conditioning and shine through as the true authentic me just as Allah made me be.

It is not in pursuing a doctorate degree and becoming a Ph.D.

But the highest form of learning is in becoming aware of yourself, your purpose, and trying your best to live it.

But you know what the tragedy is?

They teach none of that at any school or college.

Don’t kill me when I say school kills much of that learning process when it can happen despite school every waking moment of the day, day after day till the last day. 

As long as you are alive, learning, unlearning and relearning will keep happening till you take the last breath. 

But the question is, are we willing to learn?

“The illiterate of 21st century will not be those who can not read and write, but those who can not learn, unlearn, and relearn.” – Alvin Toffler