Getting Started with Lifelong Learning

Introducing Pondercraft techne

Let’s jump in. I’ve been working on this for a long time, including my own practice, so please forgive firehose. There will be time to unpack later.

Questions?

I’ll get back to you!

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What it’s Not

Normally I’m not a fan of defining things by what they are not, but in this case, it’s necessary. Everybody has an idea of what education is all about, and most are waaaay too narrow.

Lifelong learning for the Anthropocene, as I’m conceiving it, is not:

• K-12, college, grad school, professional school

• continuing education (professional)

• upskilling for the job, or over the course of a career

• enrichment learning after retirement, hobbies

• transitioning to a second career (← although this may come close)

First off, it’s for adults, people with some life experience and maturity. Mortimer Adler used to say you can’t really begin to tackle the Great Books until age 30 at least. Lifelong learning always builds on what you already know, but it’s not ongoing credentialing or re-certification in a profession. It’s more akin to old-fashioned liberal arts education than to upskilling in tech, business, or soft skills over a lifetime for the sake of job or career advancement. In short, it’s not about work, it’s about life and the continual effort required toward becoming a better, a good human, to the extent possible. There is growth in Virtue involved.

Again, it’s for adults — all adults, of any age, perhaps especially mature adults and elders — but it’s not enrichment or hobby learning. It’s not a generic sort of mental engagement with an aim to age gracefully. All these are great, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Learning for the Anthropocene is not tips and tricks or ad hoc, but systematic and purposeful in a wider, worldly sense. It’s outward-looking, not inward for self-preservation.

Lifelong learning for the Anthropocene might come closest to learning for the sake of a career or life transition — with emphasis on the transition part. I can imagine it prompting a person to re-evaluate career choices. But it’s not about work per se. One can do Anthropocene learning with as much or as little time, energy, and resources as are available. It’s deeply humanistic, about being a good human. That applies no matter what your constraints and existing commitments to job, work, career, or earning a living.

Generalist or Specialist? → Autodidact

Which brings us to the first, positive point. Lifelong learning for the Anthropocene will require you to be a generalist autodidact.

Of course, definitely, you can go down the rabbit hole of any particular specialist issue that ends up grabbing you. But to keep perspective, and to grasp where and how any budding expertise fits in, it will be necessary to keep the big picture in view, and to remain a layperson. You’ll need to make determinations about what you’ll be a player in, an NPC in, and what you’ll opt out of to be a responsible non-participant.

So many learning opportunities are available online and offline today (!), that you’ll always be able to find teachers and materials and courses and projects in which to be involved. That said, you’ll quickly need to cultivate deliberate practices for ongoing self-education. You’ll be in charge of your own learning. This is called being an autodidact.¹

As our family finished homeschooling our four children, I finally hit upon the best definition of homeschooling. It’s when parents take charge of their children’s education themselves, making good choices, adapting to children’s individual strengths and weaknesses, prioritizing and selecting from amongst many possible opportunities, and integrating across years and subjects. It’s not doing it all themselves literally at home! By the time our children were in high school, I taught them “at home” in only a few areas where I had special competence or concern. Mostly, my job was to coordinate the many learning activities resources available, so that each child had the best unique program tailored to them, whether that was public or private school or a year, tutoring, extra-curricular groups, the homeschool co-op, or local community college. (We did all those things.) Nor did we neglect everything needed for them to continue on to college, graduate study, and — each in their own way — continuing, ongoing lifelong learning as adults.

What parents do for children in a model like this is what adult learners continue to do for themselves, their children, and anyone whom they have a chance to mentor going forward, as their experience, insight, wisdom, and inclination permit.

You need to be in charge of your own learning. This is called being an autodidact.

Autodidacts are people who organize their own education. They are self-directed, literally “self-teaching” (auto, didactic). Of course, autodidacts need to consult others about where to start, but once self-directed learning gets going, with ongoing guidance from trusted mentors on the side, everyone naturally begins to discern what should come next. The key is not to stop — and to continue to question the quality of options and sources.

Autodidacts need to stay non-ideological. Keep thinking. Keep exploring. Keep growing.

Read

Books. Not just online articles, much less social media.

Multi-media is fine. Listen to (long) podcasts and video lectures from great thinkers. I have so many books and booklists that I can’t possibly read them all. A good practice for me is to listen to authors being interviewed and then go read or skim the book.

For the book itself, I read front matter, intros, and conclusions carefully to see how the author positions their work in the wider field, then head to chapters where the most important concepts are fleshed out. Finally, I check the index to see which other thinkers have been most influential to the work, what the author has to say on other matters I care about, and to discover unexpected insights.

There are four types of reading:

• general reading — books (introductions, surveys, generalist topics)

• FFFs — feeds, findings, follows (for online content)

• research reading — looking for background surveys and topical information (whatever quality source)

• systematic reading — for Great Books and texts in your personal canon

It’s a lot. Getting reading under control — if that’s even possible given the deluge — is a constant effort requiring reflection, deliberate choice, and intentionality. You’ll need serious tools and tactics.

Develop your Techne

A techne is what I call a framework of knowledge and practice. “Techne” is a Greek term, from which we get our word technology, and it means both knowledge and craft. Developing a unique, personalized techne means pulling together what you are learning, including both book learning and experiential learning, and considering how it may apply. Application is personal. It can be professional. It should be for the world in a larger way.

The details of developing and organizing a personal techne from reading, experiential learning, and iteration after putting into practice, become an essential part of crafting a customized system for lifelong learning.

Travel

Booking learning is necessary. We can’t time travel to the past. Some kinds of knowledge require wrestling with conceptual frameworks and philosophies that are only expressed in words. Other learning requires the analysis of empirical evidence and data. Gaining wisdom simply takes a long time to sit with it, discuss, pose questions, ponder a way through hard problems and dilemmas. Find time to sit at your desk, curl up with a book in your armchair. By all means. But don’t stop there.

Book learning is necessary, but travel — done sustainably, and for the sake of learning (not just to lay on a beach) — is ultimately the best way to immerse, cross-culturally, to gain on-the-ground, real life experience. I know this from experience — and I love book learning. A Confucian sage has said, “It is more eye-opening to travel ten thousand miles than to read ten thousand books.” (Dong Qichang, 读万卷书不如行万里路)

The best sort of learning is to be confronted and challenged by unexpected and diversely different ways of being human. Just today I read an article by a professor and diplomat who re-visited China for the first time since the pandemic, in which he emphasizes how important being in the place is, talking to real people, seeing things first-hand. For this, there is no substitute for travel.

Practice → Life Areas

One’s techne, as a framework of knowledge and practice, means one needs not only book learning and experiential immersion through travel, but also a way to put what you’re learning together, and put it into practice.

In simplest terms, I see four ways to do that, four Life Areas where lifelong learning can make an impact.

1. LA #1 — Personal Life — individual habits (practices) and attention to home, family, and immediate neighborhood

2. LA #2 — Work Life — making a living, job, career, day to day occupation and vocation

3. LA #3 — Travel — a system for getting beyond your bubble and being exposed to the wider world

4. LA #4 — Civic & Political Participation — giving back, reaching out

As any lifelong learner gains techne, experience, and hopefully a modicum of wisdom, leadership opportunities will appear, to teach, to travel with others, to organize and serve various types of groups: family, neighborhood organizations, local parish, professional and collegial associations, interest groups.

The keen observer of early American civil society Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his great work Democracy in America to show how the unique character and quality of public life provides the foundation for democracy as the most hopeful kind of political action by laypeople.

Core & Paths

Given these major life areas, and picking back up on the generalist/specialist dimension, lifelong learning for the Anthropocene might be sorted into a central core and several spokes or paths leading out from it.

Core and Paths make up, in effect, a curriculum.

CORE

The Core would include, first, a basic grasp of the big trends of the Anthropocene itself (A1), what makes it what it is in the first place. It would also include principles and a system for lifelong learning.

(A1, A2, A3, A4 is a framework for tackling Anthropocene complexity.)

Working out from the Core, there are a variety of Paths. Everyone should follow the first Path, to Live well. Three further Paths stand out (to me) as particularly valuable, but I can imagine a wide variety of options.

PATHS

1. Live — put Anthropocene learning into practice day to day (= Life Areas #1, #2)

2. Travel — study geography, history, cross-cultural languages, cultures, and wisdoms, then go travel (= Life Area #3)

3. Philosophy — against pervasive ideologies that seek to colonize your mind, study history, philosophy, religion, ancient wisdoms, juxtaposing to present day realities; don’t neglect modern philosophy, especially political economy (PPE); establish a personal canon of (great) books; build a tried and tested personal techne (= for all Life Areas)

4. Civic & Political Participation — especially from midlife, prioritize giving back, guiding the next generation, taking wider responsibility (= Life Area #4)

What other Paths would you identify?

Motto

In the end, what would be your model for lifelong learning in the Anthropocene?

It could be fairly simple.

Live. Learn. Lead.

Oh, and Love. ❤️

image generated by Substack

1. Check out this organization: What Is Self-Directed Education? | Alliance for Self-Directed Education. I agree with much of the philosophy here, especially for adults. We did choose to homeschool our four children through high school, and they went on to excel in more traditionally academic college and university. I do not, in fact, advocate unschooling for children, although I do agree with unschooling philosophy that creating a rich and nuanced learning environment wins families half the battle. The most conducive learning environment for children features both parents setting the example of lifelong learning.