Lifelong Learners

Recently, during an education conference, I referenced a passage from the beautiful and profound story of Alice in Wonderland. One of the characters of the story, the Red Queen, invites Alice to run incessantly and desperately. In this frantic race, Alice realizes that no matter how fast they run, they actually remain in the same spot. Exhausted after the race, Alice says to the Queen, “In our country, you’d generally get somewhere else if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.” The Queen replies, “A slow sort of country! Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” That is the reality of education, of the world of knowledge. You have to be in a permanent race to be in the same place because if you stop running, you start to fall behind. To be able to advance and get somewhere else, one would have, as the Red Queen says, to be constantly running without stopping.

Exactly forty-five years ago, at the celebration of the First International Congress on New Forms of Postsecondary Education (LACFEP) in Caracas, Venezuela, I pointed out that the new electronic media would be inevitable and necessary in the didactic strategies of learning and that all that these dazzling learning aids could accomplish was to deliver a “trained” person. But what we want and need is an “educated” person: a human being capable of understanding the dizzying world of his time and capable of adapting to it and transforming it. The men and women trained by machines will promptly realize that the skills they were taught quickly become obsolete. In turn, the educated person will develop new skills when necessary and will be able to give ethical significance to their life. These educated people will not compete fiercely with their contemporaries, but with themselves. Let us support this desire from the university by prioritizing education throughout an individual’s lifetime.