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 am still amazed at the amount of Christian charity [Wellesley] stuck us all with, a kind of glazed politeness in the face of boredom and stupidity. Tolerance, in the worst sense of the word. How marvelous it would have been to go to a women's college that encouraged impoliteness, that rewarded aggression, that encouraged argument.
Experiment! Meet new people. Thatβs better than any college education . . . By adventuring; about, you become accustomed to the unexpected. The unexpected then becomes what it really is . . . the inevitable.
When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart; don't risk making mistakes.
Some teachers just have a knack for working with autistic children. Other teachers do not have it.
"We've devoted our lives to learning about them!" Miro said. Ender stopped. "Not from them."
Observation, very general and wide-spread, has shown that small children are endowed with a special psychic nature. This shows us a new way of imparting education!
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