Jeremy C Kester

I have this idea that I’ve toyed with over the years. It involves one’s willingness and acceptance towards learning compared to their age of maturity. Of course all of that is a huge gray area, using vague words to describe vague concepts. All my evidence on these thoughts are all circumstantial, generated strictly from my experiences. It is likely that there have been studies on this. I have not looked them up. As I said, I am just toying with these thoughts.

Anyway, in many ways we consider our careers as learners (aka students) to be over by the end of college. We can also say high school, but there are more and more going to college, so I’ve pushed it back. Once that happens, I see that we begin to fall into something I’ll just describe as rapid scholarly decline. Don’t look that up thinking I got that from anywhere other than pulling words out of my ass that semi-describe an idea. We just stop learning as much. We stop using that muscle. That’s not to say we can’t learn as we grow older, it just means that we stop actively trying. Or when we are forced into learning, aka a job, we give it as little effort as possible to cross the finish line.

So how does this find its way to age of maturity?

I think that age of maturity is in itself very obscure but anyway, I believe that people stop maturing around the time that they stop actively participating in learning. I know quite a few people who are just adverse to learning something new and their behavior reflects the last active schooling year they participated in. People who are very open to learning however tend to be very mature in how they go through their lives.

I am sure that there are way more than enough examples where my thoughts fall flat. As I said above, it’s all experiential. As for me, I stopped learning in kindergarten.