New Skillset: Autonomy

I have observed over the years that a significant portion of the workforce has not been able to develop the skills to learn for themselves. What many lack are tools, methods and practices to learn and to take action. Autonomous learners face many barriers on the job, particularly the pervasive attitude that you must look busy or you’re not working.

We are trained early in life to look to authority for direction in learning and work. The idea that there is a right answer or an expert with the right answer begins in our schools. John Taylor Gatto describes this in the seven-lesson schoolteacher.

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I then enforce. If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.

The message from many workplaces continues to be that good employees wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do.

Harold nails the barrier that holds most people back today - we think that we need a lesson and a teacher. I recall the amazement that I felt as a 40 year old when I decided that I was going to teach myself physics. I found that I did not need anyone. That I did not need a lesson plan either. This was a revelation for me.

I also learned that the best approach was "play". I read what I liked and each book would point me to another. If I got stuck, I would try something else. I also found that time itself helped. That literally sleeping on stuff helped. Or even giving up for a while - maybe a year or two. I discovered the power of "processing".

But that is not what I or I bet you learned about learning.

If you have not tried to teach yourself some thing yet, I urge you to try. Pick something that you have always wanted to do but have told your self you could not. Robin has started to paint again aged nearly 60. From someone who has lived with Death as a close neighbor, she has found her desire to live grow stronger as a result.

I have found that when we become our own teacher and when we set out to learn what we want to that life returns in full flow.

Live to learn and learn to live.