We all learn in different ways (and multiple at that). Visual, spatial, via dog pictures….

Welcome to my synopsis of the most complicated chapter in an otherwise easy and interesting read. Brought to you by Marnie the Bear.

Salman Kahn begins this chapter discussing how he felt during one of the biggest crises of the current times…the 2008 credit crisis. He was thinking to himself:

So, being the creator of the Kahn Academy and overall creative thinker, he decided to make some youtube videos to help explain some of the jargon that was floating around. To him this was simply a therapeutic and, more than likely, fun process for interpreting the time that we were in. However, more and more people from all walks of life starting watching and learning from these videos. It was at this point that it really occurred to Salman:

This is turn led him to wondering, “Why does “education” stop at some point? Why isn’t it lifelong?” (Kahn 173). There are studies that suggest most people stop learning new ideas and concepts in their mid-thirties. He goes back and forth on the validity of this statistic (it being both hard to calculate as well as arbitrary to define what is “learning). However, the fact remains…at some point in your life learning becomes less of a priority. Of course, that being said, we don’t flatline our learning all at once. There are still “blips” (as he calls them) or travel or reading that involve a certain amount of learning new things. But, for the most part, we rely heavily on those things we learned in the past.

However, the ability to be a lifelong learner is something that we all, biologically, possess. It moves in the fashion of, “use it or lose it.” As your brain gets older it is more difficult for it to learn entirely new things (ie. a foreign language). On the other hand, it has been proven that adult brains learn easier by association (due to all the previous knowledge you have to pull from).

All this just goes to show that it doesn’t matter what age you are…you are capable of learning new things. You just need to find the right mode and motivation.  Kahn Academy is a great device for both the school-age, adult, and dogger brain (the latter is not proven)

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