Across-the-Board Lifetime Learning

 The educator can affect the pupil in three different ways: by the teaching word; by the pedagogical act; and by personal example. Each one of these procedural methods serves the teacher in encouraging the student’s inner participation in the educational process. For the potentialities of the teacher are limited to extraneous influence. The teacher can strive to elicit a response from the varying, deep spiritual state of the students; he can offer guidance and help to them. But the teacher’s role in the formation of the students is an indirect one since all development is self-development. All training is self-training. -- Edith Stein, Woman

My friend Chari (who co-blogs with me over here) linked to an article called Don't Go Back to School: How to Fuel the Internal Engine of Learning -- (another one of those heavy 21st c-Victorian titles). The article is interesting, but I wanted to pick out this particular bit which is actually a description of the blog:

So Brain Pickings became the record of my alternative learning, of that cross-disciplinary curiosity that took me from art to psychology to history to science, by way of the myriad pieces of knowledge I discovered — and connected — on my own.

The reason I liked that part was that it gave me a handle on what I am going for with this blog, which is still finding its feet.     A couple of days ago I worked on a post about blogging in general, but I am keeping it in the holding tank because it just wouldn't quite pull itself together.    

I read quite eclectically, but one of the most delightful things about reading as a whole experience is that it is more than the sum of its parts.   It incorporates itself into your life as a whole.  You make connections; you pose questions to one book that are sometimes answered in another book, sometimes years later.   And books don't just talk to each other in your mind, or just talk to you -- they often seem to speak to the way things are.  Or maybe they always do, but sometimes I notice it quite piercingly.

I think that having that sort of across-the-board theme will give me some cohesion that mere journaling or book-noting wouldn't do by itself. 

Patrick, my youngest, is flying his amazing superpowered poker chips around the air (they have the power to become any figures of his imagination, which generally adds up to be embattled heroes) but he is also asking for help getting his lunch, which isn't unreasonable for a 10 year old to ask of his mother, so I will close this now.