The best learning happens in real life with real problems and real people and not in classrooms.
Interpretation
Real-life experiences provide the most effective learning opportunities.
This quote by Charles Handy emphasizes the importance of experiential learning over traditional classroom education. It suggests that meaningful knowledge and skills are acquired through practical engagement with genuine challenges and interactions with others, rather than solely through theoretical instruction or passive learning environments.
In practice
During a workshop on leadership, I quoted, 'The best learning happens in real life with real problems and real people and not in classrooms.' to emphasize the value of practical experience.
The companies that survive longest are the one's that work out what they uniquely can give to the world not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.
The first step is to measure whatever can easily be measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.
Why don't we teach our children in school what they are? We should say to them, 'You are unique... you have the capacity for anything. You are a marvel'.
To learn anything other than the stuff you find in books, you need to be able to experiment, to make mistakes, to accept feedback, and to try again. It doesn't matter whether you are learning to ride a bike or starting a new career, the cycle of experiment, feedback, and new experiment is always there.
We cannot wait for great visions from great people, for they are in short supply. It is up to us to light our own small fires in the darkness.
I believe that a lot of our striving after the symbols and levers of success is due to a basic insecurity, a need to prove ourselves. That done, grown up at last, we are free to stop pretending.
I think that what we need to do is say, 'Reading is going to really affect your life.' You take a black man who doesn't have a job, but you say to him, 'Look, you can make a difference in your child's life, just by reading to him for 30 minutes a day.' That's what I would like to do.
Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.
Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me.
There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.
Kids don't make up 100 percent of our population, but they do make up 100 percent of our future.
Only a fool would let his enemy teach his children.
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