Continuing Education.

Why a commitment to your continued education will help you personally and professionally.

Knowledge is power.  It represents liberation. Without knowledge you can be taken advantage of and duped into doing things that are counterproductive. And the worst part is, you won’t even know it.

No one is perfect and there is always room for improvement. This is why Humanists are lifelong learners and advocates of continuing education in the form of personal and professional development.

Not all educational opportunities are alike. There is a tremendous amount of woo being peddled by self help gurus and life coaches. Woo is a derogatory term for non-science based nonsense peddled as knowledge.  All too often, people looking to improve themselves are led astray by peddlers of woo. This is why the self help movement has such a bad reputation. People are being taken advantage of by charlatans and they don’t even know it!

An example of woo is the positive thinking movement that is based on the book, The Secret. The idea that all you have to do is have faith and trust and a little bit of pixie dust and suddenly what you wish for will materialize is a nice thought, but it doesn’t work in the real world. Last time I checked, wishing didn’t work too well. If you want someone to send you a check in the mail, you have to do something to earn it.

Now, you may be wondering why I am picking on the positive thinking movement. It’s harmless right. And why not be positive? Well, that’s the problem with woo. It isn’t harmless. People spend money to learn the techniques. They spend time trying to solve their problems by thinking the right thoughts. They police their thoughts in an effort to think correctly. All of this is time, energy and money that isn’t being spent on fixing whatever problem you have. The worst part is that not only does this not work, you can’t get a refund! If you complain it didn’t work you will be told that it’s your fault. The coach or guru never has to issue a refund for teaching something that didn’t work. Sure it works for them. They may even be true believers. But they still suckered someone out of their money and then blamed them for their failure. That’s cruel and abusive, especially given the financial hardships people have faced recently.

It’s time to get real 

My point is that if you really want to improve you need to find teachers that will teach you reality based pragmatic approaches that will actually help you learn what you need to do to succeed. What you need is practical science based knowledge. Not woo based non-science.

Magical thinking doesn’t cut it in the real world. Whether it is a science based approach to getting the bullies and other obnoxious people in your life to stop, or a science based approach to mental health. Getting practical information that is based not just on anecdotes but on actual science will help.

I founded my company Humanist Learning Systems to provide exactly this sort of science based, humanistic education. Check out what we offer at: https://humanistlearning.com/programsoffered/

Learning how to tell the difference between woo and reality based approaches, is priceless. If you want to learn how to do this more effectively, then I recommend my 6 hour program – Living Made Simpler (http://humanistlearning.info/livingmadesimpler1/)

Why do Humanists encourage self-education?

Humanists are dedicated to self-education because we understand that education is the key to Auto-Liberation.

The Atlantic had a brilliant essay recently by Ta-Nehisi Coates called Being French.  The subtitle of the essay is: It’s hard to learn a new language. But it’s way harder to learn a new culture. (See: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/acting-french/375743/)

This brilliant essay is about the role education plays in both subjugation and liberation.  Subjugation results from the restriction of learning. The problem is that we can do this to ourselves when we restrict our own learning. Maybe we don’t want to learn.  The problem is that when we refuse to learn, we limit ourselves.

Liberation is not something that is given to us. It is something we have to learn and earn for ourselves.  This is why self-education is the key to auto-liberation.

Ta-Nehisi talks about his own journey to cosmopolitanism, which is an attitude of openness to other cultures.  Cosmopolitanism is important because it opens us up to learning.

Ta-Nehisi provides an ample example of this when he talks about the self-education of the Cherokee.  Settlers hope that by educating the Cherokee – they could control them. The opposite happened.  The Cherokee didn’t restrict their learning to what was provided for them. They took to self-education and the liberation that comes with it as if their lives depended on it – because it did.

To quote Ta-Nehsis “Openness to education did not make the Cherokee pliant to American power; it gave them tools to resist that power. Realizing this, the United States dropped the veneer of “culture” and “civilization” and resorted to “Indian Removal,” or The Trail of Tears.”

Restriction of learning is a tool of suppression. Control of education is power. If you want to have power and autonomy, you have to control your own learning. You have to make learning a priority for yourself and to actively seek out opportunities to learn.  This is why Humanists consider education so important.

Ta-Nehisi continues, “In our time, it is common to urge young black children toward education so that they may be respectable or impress the “right people.” But the “right people” remain unimpressed, and the credentials of black people, in a country rooted in white supremacy, must necessarily be less. That great powers are in the business of using "respectability" and "education" to ignore these discomfiting facts does not close the book. You can never fully know. But you can walk in the right direction.”

That right direction? Self-education and auto-liberation.