I believe that educators should aim to encourage lifelong learning. The mission of encouraging social activism conflicts with that. The social activist implicitly says, “I know enough already. Let me fix society.” Rather than cater to that mindset, educators should lean against it.
A social activist might respond that there are wrongs in the world and we must confront them. Educators need to model standing up against wrongs. If you merely encourage students to question their own beliefs, to be open minded, and to consider different perspectives, they will become passive in the face of injustice. Instead, educators should inspire students to be idealistic and to act on the basis of those ideals.
My reply is that it is easy to be self-righteous and closed-minded without bringing about a better world. Hitler was self-righteous and closed-minded. Lenin was self-righteous and closed-minded. Hamas is self-righteous and closed-minded.
Human improvement has come from learning. We learned how to achieve better health and greater longevity. We learned how to grow enough food so that people do not have to go hungry. We learned how to cooperate in large societies.
But we do not know everything that we need to know in order to live better. Both individually and collectively, we have more to learn. We have more to learn today, and we will have more to learn tomorrow.
To learn requires an open mind. My father, Merle Kling, used to say that the First Iron Law of Social Science is “Sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way.” My undergraduate economics professor, Bernie Saffran, would say “I’m willing to be wrong,” meaning that his ideas were open to challenge. My graduate adviser, Robert Solow, said in his address to the American Economic Association that government intervention in markets is neither always right nor always wrong.
If you study with a great professor of the Classics, that professor will help you to understand what you can learn from Plato. If you study with a great empirical researcher, that researcher will help you to understand how to learn from data. If you study with a great scientist, that scientist will help you to understand how you can learn from theory and observation. If you study with a great engineer, that engineer will help you to understand how you can learn to make better material things. If you study with a great executive, that executive will help you to understand how an organization can learn to be more effective.
The greatest people in business, sports, and culture never stop learning. They constantly strive to enhance their capabilities.
One way to identify talent early is to spot someone who acquires deep domain knowledge at a young age. For example, I was told that when Sam Altman was 19, he had an idea for a business involving location services. When he pitched the idea to venture capitalists, they were skeptical that someone that young would understand all of the technical issues involved. But he could answer all of their questions.
It looks to me as though colleges are doing a lot to discourage young people from learning. The mission of lifelong learning is a higher mission than social justice activism. Colleges took a wrong turn when they focused on social justice activism.
I believe that the Internet has the potential to make lifelong learning much easier. It makes more information available. It makes it possible to connect with people at a distance. We should be experimenting with approaches to higher education that take better advantage of the Internet. And now that chatbots have shown promise, we should be experimenting with approaches to higher education that take advantage of those as well.
FWIW, Pew has some related survey data from 2016:
"73% of adults consider themselves lifelong learners.
74% of adults are what we call personal learners – that is, they have participated in at least one of a number of possible activities in the past 12 months to advance their knowledge about something that personally interests them. These activities include reading, taking courses or attending meetings or events tied to learning more about their personal interests.
63% of those who are working (or 36% of all adults) are what we call professional learners – that is, they have taken a course or gotten additional training in the past 12 months to improve their job skills or expertise connected to career advancement.
These learning activities take place in a variety of locations. The internet is often linked to a variety of learning pursuits. However, it is still the case that more learners pursue knowledge in physical settings than choose to seek it online.
By an 81% to 52% margin, personal learners are more likely to cite a locale such as a high school, place of worship or library as the site at which personal learning takes place than they are to cite the internet.
By a similar margin (75% to 55%), professional learners are more likely to say their professional training took place at a work-related venue than on the internet."
See: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/03/22/lifelong-learning-and-technology/
And, of course, as would be expected, the survey found that people who did not view themselves as lifelong learners or participate in such activities were disproportionately Black.
Pondering this led me to an interesting April 2023 journal article entitled "What makes adults choose to learn: Factors that stimulate or prevent adults from learning" available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14779714231169684
This article suggests that, among a couple of other things, perhaps it is a sense of personal agency that influences whether or not adults choose to engage in lifelong learning. The article might be of particular interest to this readership since it cites rather heavily the great Nobel winning economist Amartya Sen. The article concludes"
"we argue that looking at socio-demographic background characteristics and barriers to participation is insufficient in understanding why adults do not learn. Providing the evidence base for adult learning policy development and the monitoring of policies requires a re-examining of how adults’ connection to learning is positioned in a wider social, economic, environmental context and how this context provides a conducive environment in which adults first of all would value learning and can pursue learning. Based on the capability approach, we explored the interplay between different factors that influence whether adults intentionally act towards engaging in organised and structured learning or development activities. Agency, conversion and perceived benefits of learning are mutually enforcing whether adults see learning as a valuable (life) choice.
This approach opens new perspectives to empirically explore the interplay between agency, conversion and benefits and identify main factors stimulating adult learning. This empirical research will bring us closer to a validated conceptual model on what prevents and what stimulates adults to learn. A model that is very much needed to evaluate and monitor adult learning and lifelong learning policies delivering on their priority status and combating current and future economic and societal challenges."
This, of course, subverts the oppressor-oppressed axis that is the foundation of the current US education model. Nevertheless, one might reasonably wonder whether, promoting lifelong learning or not, the question of whether or not the USA education system is producing individuals with well developed senses of agency might be a foundational issue and any shortcomings addressed there might go a long way towards addressing symptoms such as non-participation in lifelong learning.
On a related but possibly tangential note, I’ve noticed that politicians are quoting “the experts” these days, when justifying their policy decisions. Too often, the experts they quote are, in fact, activists or advocates, by which I mean people who push one side of an issue, look only at the evidence supporting the one side, and ignore and/or denigrate anything relating to the other side. Careful consideration of policy decisions, looking at all the evidence and the pros/cons of various paths, has been abandoned in favour of choosing a single ideological path and then justifying it after the fact. Examples are numerous, including the Covid response, the government approach to climate change, etc.