I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Interpretation
Learning can often come from unconventional methods and experiences.
Margaret Atwood suggests that true knowledge often arises not just from formal education or direct learning, but from exploring alternative paths and experiences. By acknowledging the lessons learned from avoiding traditional learning methods, she highlights the value of personal growth through self-discovery and life's challenges.
In practice
In a speech about unconventional learning, one could cite this quote to inspire others to embrace their unique journeys.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance.
Whatever the intellectual quality of the education given our children, it is vital that it include elements of love and compassion, for nothing guarantees that knowledge alone will be truly useful to human beings.
I regularly take my entrepreneurship students out walking because I want to get them in the habit of noticing and thinking about what they notice. They have to leave their phones behind to learn the basic lesson: Be where you are.
If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community.
All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.
The education of attention would be an education par excellence
Education is preparation to live completely.
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